Dotted
Works built from repeated dots, spots or small circles, used as pattern, as a way of mixing colour, or as the image itself.
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About
The dot is the simplest mark a hand can make, and it has served many ends. At Papunya in Central Australia, senior men began in 1971 to transfer designs from ceremony and ground painting onto boards and canvas, and dotted infill became a hallmark of the movement that followed. The practice spread across the desert communities, and artists such as Dorothy Napangardi and Willy Tjungurrayi used fields of dots to map country and ancestral stories; dotting can also veil sacred detail not meant for outsiders.
Elsewhere the dot has been optical or mechanical. Georges Seurat built pictures from small touches of pure colour in the 1880s, Roy Lichtenstein enlarged the printed Ben-Day dots of comics in paintings such as Whaam! (1963), and Yayoi Kusama has covered canvases, rooms and bodies with polka dots since the late 1950s. Look at whether dots are placed by hand or spaced mechanically.