Pointillist garden colors

Here’s a planting that reached this critical stage a couple months ago, a clustering of pink gaura (Gaura lindheimeri), blue ivy-leaved sage (Salvia cacaliaefolia) and the wacky mixed red and/or white blooms of Salvia microphylla ‘Hot Lips.’ The plants have flowers of approximately the same size, and from just a few feet away you stop to see the individual flowers and begin to see the planting as a gentle vibration of colors that move from pink to red to white to blue. (The reddish foliage of the gaura also adds to the effect.)

It makes me think a little bit of the similar color effects in the paintings of Georges Seurat. His best-known painting, La Grande Jette, inspired Stephen Sondheim to compose his musical, Sunday in the Park with George.

Georges Seurat. A Sunday on La Grande Jette-1884, 1884–1886. Oil on canvas, 207.5 x 308 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago. [ source ]

Seurat Grande Jette detail

On the canvas, pointillist little dots of color give a vibratory shimmer to the surface of the painting. Instead of mixing the colors on his palette, he lets your eye do it.

Big chunks of garden color laid out next to each other can be a great effect. But I also like the shimmer of little dots of color. Seurat had an interesting thing going on with his later work–Why not appropriate it for the garden ?