Pointillism and the Dimensions of God's Love
- Laura Kim
- Oct 3
- 5 min read
Updated: Dec 14
“-that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” -Eph. 3:17-19
I stood before it with tears welling in my eyes. It was so vastly different than what I’d seen in books, so much more impressive than what had been described to me. I was utterly caught off-guard and frozen in its presence. I hadn’t expected to see it there, and the element of surprise made it even more striking. I would like to say I was gazing at the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls, but I was instead gob smacked by a 241-year-old French painting made entirely of tiny, colored dots. Now, more than 20 years later, the experience of viewing this work of art is teaching me something about the dimensions of God’s love.
The Art Institute of Chicago is the happy home of artist Georges Seurat’s 1884-1886 magnum opus, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. It’s a feat of genius by all standards, a scientifically crafted masterpiece done using the technique of pointillism, which involves layering thousands of dots of individual color next to each other using a poised tip of a paintbrush, so the viewer ends up blending the colors with their eyes, (optical blending), rather than the artist blending them physically with his brush. The scene is typical for the time. Ladies in poufy dresses and gentlemen in tall hats stroll along the Seine River. Children play, boats sail, dogs frolic with a random monkey; apparently a normal Sunday afternoon in Paris in the late 1800s. It’s a feast for the eyes, but on that day, as an art-obsessed high school Junior on a trip to Chicago with my family, I wasn’t even aware this painting was at the museum.
(Take a moment and view it on Google Arts and Culture in ultra-high resolution. Zoom way in to about 80% until you can see the tiny dots of color that make up the forms. https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/a-sunday-on-la-grande-jatte/twGyqq52R-lYpA?hl=en )
I’d encountered this painting before in art class- it’s a real sweetheart of every K-12 art educator- so I was familiar, but mostly unimpressed. I’d paged through art textbooks in school and encountered it in tiny thumbnail format. I had heard lectures about the skill it took to paint with such precision and detail. I’d even sat in class, armed with a Q-tip and a paint palette attempting a crude imitation as per my teacher’s orders. But here it was in real life, and all I could do was gasp at the sheer size of it. The insanity of this work is that Seurat painted it on a canvas that was nearly 7 feet tall and almost 11 feet wide! This behemoth spanned an entire wall of the gallery and dwarfed the other masterworks in its vicinity; 70 square feet of canvas perfectly peppered with tiny, individual dots of paint. It took him 2 years to complete, and he made an estimated 40-70 studies of the painting before starting work on the final version. That level of detail and intentionality on such a grand scale was stunning. I had understood some of its merits, but I hadn’t grasped its dimensions.
Dimensions matter deeply. Anyone who’s attempted to naïvely fit an overstuffed couch through a tiny doorframe can attest to this. The apostle Paul knew it, and in Ephesians 3:18 he pleads that we would know, really know, the “breadth and length and height and depth…” of something with such grand scope and precise intentionality it cannot be fully known: the love of God toward us in Jesus Christ. In other words, the level of detail of God’s love on such a grand eternal scale is stunning.
If you took a moment earlier to zoom in on Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon, you’d notice that the deeper you dive into the painting, the big picture disappears and all you see are dabs of thick paint in opposing colors that don’t seem to fit alongside each other. My favorite section close-up is the face of the woman in the black dress with an umbrella. Her face is a cacophony of periwinkle blue, yellow ochre, gaudy pink and muddled peachy gray. These colors seem like a poor choice if your goal is to paint human skin. As you zoom back out, however, the magic of optical color blending works on our eyes, and a perfectly natural face snaps into form. Height and width aren’t enough to capture the genius of the work; you also need the element of depth to see beyond the appearance of the surface to the miniscule parts that make the whole.
When Paul pleads with us longingly in Ephesians 3:18 to plumb the depth of God’s love, my mind goes to this kind of Seurat-level depth. It’s a depth of love that can place things in close contact with each other that seem ridiculous at their most zoomed in state, but is so sure of the end goal, and so intentionally aware of the glory of the finished result, that the dots are placed in full, tender confidence. When I zoom in on any one moment in my life, I can remember asking, “Why is this happening?” or telling God, “This makes no sense.” But even with the limited perspective of looking back on those moments from today’s vantage point, I can see how that dot played against the others He already knew he was going to add. And that’s just my little life, imagine this process occurring for all of time, over the course of all of history. God’s love is genius in its depth of detail, breathtaking in its scope.
According to Paul’s aching prayer,“strength to comprehend” is needed to live a life that marvels at the dimensions of Christ’s love both in the details, and in the grand finished picture. This "strength to zoom out" is, praise God, not from us. We're daily drowning in a sea of single dots. We're zoomed way in on the lives and circumstances bumping ours right now. The next time you find yourself in close, difficult, contact with someone who is completely different from you, thank God for putting that blue dot next to your peach dot! Chances are you’ll complement each other well when we all stand amazed at the finished work. Ask for His strenth to remember that current griefs, hurts and fears somehow have a role to play in the painting, they're not dots haphazrdly plunked on the canvas, He's too genius and too lovingly invested in His work for any error. Allow God’s word to give you zoomed-out glimpses of where this is all going- hints of perspective whispering that this thumbnail-sized image we’re all seeing right now doesn’t do any justice to the glorious scope of the work.
