Scrolling through Instagram, maybe watching a cringey reel, or just waiting for that one WhatsApp message, could you have ever imagined that the screen glowing in your hand is actually a distant relative of a very chill Sunday afternoon... painted in France, over a century ago?
Sounds bizarre! Right? The year was 1884, when tranquillity had a space in the world, and people with no internet, social media or Netflix, were chilling by the River Seine in Paris and were captured forever inside a masterpiece of a 25-year-old French painter, Georges Seurat. The painting was named: ‘A Sunday on the Island of La Grande Jatte.’
What took Seurat nearly two years to paint, wasn’t just another great artwork like those of other painters of his generation, its brilliance lies in the technique he used to create it.
He discovered what he called 'Divisionism' or Pointillism. The funda was simple: instead of mixing Red and Yellow on his palette to make Orange, he'd put tiny, unmixed dots of pure Red and Yellow right next to each other on the canvas.
Your brain, doing some serious over-time work (even without a deadline!)sees those close-set dots and optically blends them in your eye. And Tada! From a distance, you see a vibrant, luminous orange. It's a scientific illusion that creates a complete, cohesive picture.
Jump ahead more than a hundred years. Look at the screen in front of you, whether it’s your iPhone, your TV, or that giant display lighting up a stadium. What you’re staring at is a combination of millions of tiny dots called pixels. And each of those pixels? It’s built from even smaller sub-pixels in red, green, and blue , the good old RGB colour model we learned about back in school.
Now, here’s the twist: those colours don’t blend physically. There’s no paint involved. Instead, the screen flashes pure beams of light side by side, letting your eyes do all the heavy lifting. When the dots shine at different brightness levels, your brain stitches them together into smooth images , just like Seurat’s painted dots forming a complete scene on canvas.
The word pixel didn’t exist until the 1960s, coined during the rise of television and early imaging tech. And of course, Seurat wasn’t secretly sketching out blueprints for the iPhone. But his approach , rooted deeply in colour theory and human perception , nailed one crucial principle: optical mixing. It’s the science of letting the human eye merge tiny colour elements into a unified image.
So no, the dots in Seurat’s painting didn’t evolve into circuit boards. But the idea behind them? That’s the same one at the heart of your screen today.
The next time you’re mindlessly scrolling at 2 a.m. in the night, take a second to realise what’s happening. You’re engaging in a century-old visual illusion. That glowing image, whether it’s a meme, a movie, or your mate’s puppy, owes something to a French artist who once looked at a river bank in Paris and thought, “I can recreate this, scientifically.” Funny, isn’t it? Art history turned out to be the first draft of your tech manual.
