Kaitlin has painstaking passion for pointillism

Pointillism is an artform that involves creating works from small, distinct dots of ink or paint, applied in patterns to form an image.

The term itself was coined by art critics in the late 1880s to ridicule works by painters such as Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, but has since become the official title for an artform that Whanganui pointillist Kaitlin Hill says takes "many, many, hours" of work.

"The reality is, something like my Elvis [Presley] drawing took upwards of 100 hours to complete," Hill said.

"The same goes for my King David picture, which is a similar size."

Hill said she became aware of pointillism at Whanganui High School, after studying a George Seurat's painting titled "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte".

"It really started in 2014 when I followed a tattoo artist called Hannah Snowden on Instagram who also did drawings.

"I wanted to give it a go, and luckily I seem to have the knack for it.

"Throughout high school I was painting but now I hate it, it's far too messy, and, funnily enough, I don't have the patience for it."

Hill said she was entirely self-taught and only used a 0.03mm pen to complete her work.

"Every time I find a smaller pen I need to do it with that, but I'm not sure I can find one that's less than 0.03.

"I have OCD, and I find that this kind of art goes quite well with that, because it calms everything in me but it's also a very strategic way to create an image.

"I like things to be very precise with it, and that goes hand-in-hand with my OCD."

Hill said she started with a reference image and sketched the outline of it on her iPad.

"I take it from being an actual photo to putting it into lines, and from there I'll sketch it out on to paper, and I usually convert any coloured image into black-and-white beforehand.

"There's always the temptation to scribble some shade in, but you can tell straight away if someone's done that."

Aside from pictures of Elvis Presley and King David, Hill has also completed dotted drawings of a deer skull, a Kodak film case and a Buzzy Bee, with her next project being a much larger image of a rare Air Jordan sneaker.

"God knows how long that will take, hundreds and hundreds of hours.

"I started it in lockdown, and it's still a ridiculous way away from being finished.

"I probably won't have it done until the end of the year."

Hill said that while she was "relatively new" to the Whanganui art scene, she hoped to make pointillism her fulltime job in the future.

"In recent months I've got pretty determined to make a career out of it, and hopefully one day I can call myself a professional doodler."

Mike Tweed
Whanganui Chronicle 1/8/20