Early Pointillism

by Adrian “Adi” Catanescu
Originally written in Romanian

I was... I don't remember exactly, in fifth or sixth grade. I think fifth. Or maybe sixth. In any case, I was still at that age when art class was, for most of us, a kind of... little adventure. Not necessarily because we loved drawing, but because, well, it was something different from math or grammar.

During one of those classes, we were asked to make a drawing using Grigorescu's The Little Shepherd as our model.

And we all did whatever we thought we had to do to make our drawings turn out as well as possible. Each in our own way. Some pressed hard with their pencils, others barely touched the paper. Some erased and started over, while others... well, others moved ahead with a confidence that made me envy them a little.

Four drawings stood out and received the highest grade: a ten.

They were displayed in the glass case in the school hallway.

And if you stood there for a while and looked at them, you could notice something interesting. Although they all represented the same thing, they were very different.

They almost... reflected the personalities of the children who had made them.

One had been drawn with that bold, precise confidence of a child who never doubts himself. The line was firm, decisive. It went where it was supposed to go, and that was that.

Another had countless hesitant lines searching for one another. It was as though the hand was trying to find the right line but was never entirely sure it had found it.

And then there was another one...

One of the drawings was done in pencil, of course, so it was black and white, but it looked completely different.

Up close... up close, it didn't look like much.

If you looked at it from just a few inches away, what you saw was a collection of hundreds... no, thousands of dots. Tiny dots placed next to one another, their density changing according to the shade the young “artist” wanted to create.

There were no lines.

There were dots.

And that was all.

Except that if you took a few steps back... something happened.

The dots began to disappear.

No, actually, they didn't disappear. They were all still there. It was just that your eyes stopped seeing them as individual dots. Somehow, your brain gathered them together, and out of that multitude of tiny black marks, an image appeared.

And the image was... almost real.

Much later, I would learn that Seurat did something similar, except that he combined dots of color.

Pointillism.

But back then, nobody had ever told us about pointillism.

And, of course, the concept of a pixel didn't even exist for us. At least not in our world.

I don't think that child knew anything about any of this.

He had simply noticed.

He had noticed that if you placed the dots close enough together, making them denser or more sparse depending on how dark an area needed to be, you could build an image without actually drawing the image itself.

And, more than anything, he wanted to make as perfect a copy of The Little Shepherd as he could.

That was all.

Or at least that's what we thought at the time.

Much, much later, I learned what had become of that child.

He had risen to a position where... well, in such a position, being incorruptible isn't necessarily a quality that wins you many friends.

He was inflexible.

A crusader for justice.

A man who had little tolerance for compromise.

And precisely because of that, a man whom many of the people around him found rather difficult to like.

Especially in a world where corruption had become, if not exactly the rule, at least a kind of... modus vivendi.

And then, I don't know why, I remembered that drawing.

Those dots.

Those thousands of dots placed one beside another with an almost absurd patience, each one in its place, each with its own intensity, not one too many, not one too few.

That meticulousness.

That rigor.

At ten or twelve years old, the child probably knew nothing about the man he would one day become.

But in some strange way... he had already revealed him.

Not through the drawing itself.

But through the way he had made it.

Perhaps sometimes a person's character doesn't suddenly appear when he becomes an adult.

Perhaps it is there from the very beginning... only we, the people around him, don't yet know how to see it.

Just like that drawing...

Up close, all you could see were dots.

You had to step back a little...

to understand the picture.