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Created: April 26, 2003
Latest Update: April 26, 2003
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Mandy and Jeanne Play with Pointillism and Icons

Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, April 2003.
"Fair use" encouraged.

Mandy Unverszagt sent her pointillist portrait of Mom or Jesus just for fun. I found it fascinating that she had constructed the portrait, apparently in Paint, by using the brush alone, and that her title suggested that you couldn't tell much about who the portrait was intended to be. My corel Photo House program (freebie with my setup) has a pointillist brush. That means it produces the dots all by itself.

I wondered if I could manage with the pointillist brush to make us all more aware of what makes the difference between Mom and Jesus visually. I didn't know how to use the brush, so I first experimented by copying Mandy's portrait. Did a pretty bad job; I got the face too short. But this is an exercise at illocutionary understanding of what artists are doing, and I didn't take the time to redo it. Maybe some of you will.

Mandy's Pointillist Portrait: Mom or Jesus?

Jeanne's Attempt to Bring Out Jesus Over Mom
Drawing over Mandy's Portrait

I added a halo. Gave the figure long shoulder-length straight hair. Brought out the olive green dots at the bottom of the face to appear more like a beard. All these are characteristics of how many of our images show Jesus. These would be called "status characteristics." Characteristics that as soon as we see them, give us a clue as to which social group the person belonged. Halo would tell us religious, saint or God. Shoulder-length hair tells us olden times or very post-modern. That's when those hair styles prevailed.The beard immediately gives us the clue to gender. I also lightened the lips because of our gender expectations. I made the eyes bigger, but that was an accident. Once I got the pointillist brush to work, I couldn't seem to get it not to work. That's what made the eyes bigger.

So when you're playing with portraits that could be either Mom or Jesus, one hot clue is to draw on some of the status characteristics that we use for clues about who people are and where they fit in our society. One reason children's stick figures are usually not identifiable as anyone in reality is because they are not yet aware of these characteristics by which we categorize people, and so they don't make use of them.

Jeanne's Attempt to Bring Out Mom Over Jesus
Drawing over Mandy's Portrait

I fashioned the hair a little in a bubble-like style. Shortened the face to compensate for no beard, and lengthened the neck. Added earrings, and left the lips bright red. The eyes are bigger, but again, that's because of the pointillist brush that I didn't know how to change out of.

Jeanne's Attempts to Bring out Mom and Jesus by Copying Mandy's Portrait

As I said, I did a poor job of copying. Sorry. But you'll see the same attention to status characteristics changing the original portrait in this group:

Jeanne's Copy of Mom or Jesus?

Bringing Jesus Out Over Mom

Bringing Mom Out Over Jesus

I actually like Mandy's a lot better than my copies. But that's what copying is for. So that we can come to an illocutionary understanding of the Other. If I had the time, I'd make my copies with bigger dots, as Mandy did, and try to capture some of her spontaneity, which I didn't do at all in my own portraits.

Also, when I first started playing with this, a couple of hours ago, I had no idea what I was doing. I just knew I wanted to find out how we know whether it's Jesus or Mom. Notice that I tried to give other clues through dress and I made the face portrait a full bust. I didn't recognize until I could study them all together, that I could have made these changes without changing Mandy's face portrait to a bust portrait. I figured out how to get to the layer where Mandy's work was after I had done the copies. Notice how much I had learned by then.

Artists play like this all the time. They experiment with each others' styles. And in the process they come to have a feeling for what the style is expressing. That's a form of illocutionary discourse. I couldn't have told you this about Mandy's portrait until after I had played with it a while, stared at it, tried to copy it, and contemplated the difference. Notice that in the Mom version of the portrait, I had started to darken and enlarge the dots. Unfortunately, I wasn't quite sure how to work the brush. But you can see the difference it made in the portrait over the one where I tried to bring out Jesus over Mom. That's listening, or seeing, in good faith.

Notice also that because I was using a software program that imitated pointillism, I couldn't get pure yellow, pure green, pure brown, as Mandy did. Remember that pointillism is based on putting different colors next to each other to create a shimmering color illusion. The program put other colors in the yellow, whether I liked it or not. But that emphasizes for you that pointillism is not just a bunch of dots.