French ‘Neo-Impressionist’ painter Paul Signac or Paul Victor Jules Signac (November 11, 1863 – August 15, 1935) was born into a bourgeois family in Paris. Paul targeted architecture as his career, until he abandoned the idea at the age of eighteen to pursue a career in painting. He traveled near the coasts of Europe, painting the landscapes he encountered. Later, Paul also painted the landscapes of the cities of France. The turning point in Signac’s pictorial career was in 1884, when he met Georges Seurat and Claude Monet. Seurat’s disciplined working techniques and his ideas about colors impressed Signac. Inspired by Seurat, Paul abandoned the tiny brushstrokes of ‘Impressionism’ for tiny, technically juxtaposed dots of pure colours, designed to mix and match not only on the canvas, but also in the eye of the beholder, the defining trait of ‘Pointillism’. . Paul’s most famous painting, “The Bonaventura Pine in St. Tropez (Le pin de Bonaventura a Saint-Tropez),” is a marvel. His other famous works include ‘Port St. Tropez and’, ‘Saint Tropez’ and ‘The Papal Palace’.
Created in 1892, “The Bonaventure Pine at St. Tropez” is an oil on canvas ‘Landscape Painting’. In his painting, Signac captures a massive stone pine in St. Tropez, on a 25″ x 32″ canvas. The artist painted the bright light that shines on the deep surface of the pine needles, the sea and the grassy land. The painting reflects a perfect mix of sky, earth and sea. The background of “The Bonaventure Pine in St. Tropez” is an abstraction of green, white, blue, yellow, and orange. The landscape behind the Buenaventura Pine, the cloudy sky, the mountain and the ship sailing in the sea, promise the beauty and passivity of the painting. Paul repeatedly placed consistent dots of pigment flows and swirls, defining lustrous contours.
The best part of “The Bonaventure Pine in St. Tropez” is the use of many paint dots as light pixels. Through ‘pointillism’, Paul mixes light from far away on the retina of the eye and lets the brain mix the color instead of him mixing the color on the canvas. “The Bonaventure Pine in St. Tropez” is actually a contemporary movement painting, which moves away from the usual ‘Photorealism’ of the time.
In 1900 Paul Signac moved away from ‘Pointillism’ as he never stopped at just one medium. He experimented with watercolours, oil paints, pen and ink sketches, etchings and lithographs. Until his death in 1935, Paul was president of the annual Salon des Independent (Society of Independent Artists). He was a motivation mainly for André Derain, Henri Matisse and various other amateur painters, as he inspired them towards the work of the ‘Fauvists’ and ‘Cubists’, thus taking advantage of the growth of ‘Fauvism’ as well. “The Bonaventure Pine in St. Tropez” is currently on display at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, USA.
