Pointillism is a way of painting that became famous in the late 1800s, especially in France. Instead of pulling a brush to make a smooth patch or a long stroke, the painter puts down thousands of tiny spots of colour, side by side. Stand close and you see dots. Stand back and your eye mixes them into grass, water, a dress, a face. Though actually the painters who worked this way were trying to be careful about colour, not messy: little spots of pure colour were meant to sparkle more than paint mixed on a plate. Georges Seurat is the name most English books attach to it. It is an art-history word. A dotted doodle on a phone, or any picture that happens to use spots, is not automatically pointillism — the word names that late-nineteenth-century style, not every dot you ever see.

點描法、點彩派