Derek Cracco

Region: South

In a nod to the French postimpressionist painter Georges Seurat, who devised a painting method in which imagery emerged from thousands of colored dots, I have created a series of intimate, detailed, pointillist-style paintings in which I rely on repetition and attention to detail to make fields of flashes, stars, and light. My influences range from astronomy to particle physics; my paintings shift and oscillate between the macro and the micro, between the illusion of light and the visual disruption the images produce when viewed at close range. These works embody a nuanced understanding of color theory. In a lineage descended from Victor Vasarely, I combine subtleties of color with both optics and illusion to create retinal images that work on multiple levels. The use of a field of single dots allows me to get to the aspects of the works that I find most interesting: color and light.