Thunderstorm (after Giorgione), Neo Pointilism | Oilpainting by Martin Missfeldt

Image Description

The oil painting "The Thunderstorm" based on the Renaissance artist Giorgione shows the whole world in one picture. Of course, I painted it in neo-pointilistic style. The picture is created only in the eye of the beholder, and his distance from the picture plays an essential role. The farther away you are, the better you can see the motif. Those who know the original by Giorgione will even be able to recognize the picture the better with increasing distance (because the gaps are then filled from the visual memory). The closer you get to the painting, the more the image blurs and the colored dots crowd in. Because of their optical dominance - and because any form-giving lines are missing - it is almost impossible to recognize anything at close distance.

Most people, however, will not see my pictures in the original, but only the digital images that can be found on the Internet. There is a similar effect here: in Google Image Search (or on the overview pages of this homepage), the image is only visible as a thumbnail in stamp format. This corresponds to a large viewer distance, so the subject is still recognizable. The mttel-sized version on this page corresponds somewhat to a viewer distance of 3-4 meters. Here it tilts back and forth between motif and abstract dots. At the bottom of this page I have a few more enlarged views, which correspond to a viewer experience of about 60-80 cm. So only the dots are recognizable. Everything concrete dissolves.

Recognizable are a clothed man (left edge of the picture) and an almost exposed woman with child (right). They are in a nature-picture space, whose landscape shows not only buildings, but also plants, a river course as well as a wide sky including massive clouds and twitching lightning. The qualitative and quantitative distribution of colors also corresponds roughly to what we know from a harmonious landscape. Everything about Giorgione's original is just right - except that it is perhaps (for historical reasons) too small.

Read more about ...

• Oil Painting Introduction
• History of oil painting
• Stretcher frames
• Oil Paint: Ingredients and Properties