Video: Pointillism in Pop Art: Peter Mason Paintings from Postage Stamps
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
Pointillism (or point technique) originated at the end of the 19th century, when artists decided not to mix colors on the palette, but to make point strokes with clean, bright colors. At a distance, they merged to give a picturesque image. Something similar was undertaken by Peter Mason, only in the role of his "pixels" are thousands of used postage stamps.
Artist Peter R. Mason taught painting and design all his life and only in retirement completely focused on a long-held hobby and now creates paintings from postage stamps. These are landscapes and portraits of outstanding personalities of the twentieth century, who, in fact, glorified the master.
Before starting to work with stamps, Peter Mason draws a pencil sketch on a large sheet of paper. He then divides the image into "pixels", each the size of a postage stamp.
In the meantime, the postage stamps themselves are being prepared. Each must be carefully soaked and dried. By cutting off the white margins, the artist sorts the stamps by color. Now you can paste the "pixels" - and the work in the style of pop art pointillism is ready. The meticulousness of Peter Mason bears remarkable fruit, because his paintings look like color photographs.
The artist spends 3, 5 thousand marks on an average painting measuring 3 × 4 meters. And the largest canvas of the master of pop-art consists of 22 thousand paper “pixels”. And after all, initially each brand had to be processed for a long time. It is no wonder that Peter Mason began to have enough time for creativity only in retirement.
In connection with the monumental size of the paintings, another question arises: where does the artist get so many used stamps? After all, even if all the acquaintances begin to bring old envelopes (and they do), there will be clearly not enough raw materials.
Recently, Peter Mason has been assisted by postage stamp makers with materials. They are interested in immortalizing their products in the works of a master who combined the century and a half technique of pointillism with modern trends in art.
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