Compare and contrast how Monet, Seurat, and Chuck Close use color in the development of their paintings.Compare the use of color in Monet’s,...

In his impressionist paintings such as Haystack
at Sunset Monet attempted to capture his impression of the scene he was
painting.  He applied paint to his canvas in a rough, quick style to capture a fleeting
impression of the colors he was seeing.  Often times, he applied unmixed paint to the
painting, allowing them to combine visually from a distance.  This resulted in a
luminous use of color because the unmixed bright colors were actually present on the
canvas.

Seurat was the master of visual color mixing. 
Unlike Monet his style was not rough, but precise and almost scientific. In his
paintings,  A Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte and
Bathers at Asnieres, He specifically placed tiny little brush strokes of
unmixed color using his pointillism technique, so that the viewer’s eye would combine
the colors at a distance.  The pure hues are present in his paintings, but it gives off
a more controlled overall impression than the work of
Monet.

Chuck Close’s work is directly connected to
photography.  All of his pieces, such as his portrait of Bill Clinton, started with a
photographic portrait taken by himself.  He then followed a specific process that
involved dividing the photographic print into a grid, duplicating the grid on his
canvas, and then creating tiny little abstract reproductions of the values and colors
present in each square of the grid.  The result, when executed on a large scale, is a
hyper realistic representation of the original photo.  Up close, the picture seems very
abstract.  The pure colors, again, are very visible when close to the picture.  It is
only when the viewer gets further away, that the image appears realistic.  This allows
Close to use bright vivid colors often in complementary pairs that visually mix together
from far away and end up appearing very real.