Art graduate recreates French masterpiece

INTERACTIVE Art student Nikki Douthwaite has recreated a French masterpiece with some B&Q colour charts and a pair of tweezers.

Nikki ditched her paint palate and used hole-punched circles of coloured paper - 560,000 of them to be exact – for her modern version of a Seurat classic.

For 18 hours a day over three months, Nikki has been painstakingly sticking each dot in place with double-side sticky tape and tweezers.

The massive work, measuring 10.5ft by 7ft, has been on display at MMU’s Art & Design Degree Shows where it was seen by 15,000 visitors.

Labour of love

Nikki, from Cheshire, completed the mammoth task as part of her Interactive Arts degree. She said: “I’ve hardly left the house in three months. They say an artist should toil and suffer for their art, and I now I definitely know how those penniless old-school artists felt!”

Nikki was inspired by Georges-Pierre Seurat’s painting entitled Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.

Seurat was a pointillist, meaning he didn’t blend the paint himself but painted in dots, leaving the viewer’s eye to blend the colours.

Now almost 125 years later, Nikki has done the same, not in paint but in paper.

She even sat in the exact same spot – on the banks of the Seine - where the Frenchman would have sat in the 1880s.

Inspiration

“I went to see what it was like now,” said Nikki. “I sat there for three days recording people coming and going. I knew I had to do something different.”

“It’s interesting that most art is appreciated from a distance, but mine is more impressive close up! At the exhibition people looking at it were quite shocked when they got close up.

“I had no idea what it would look like when I started, but I’m pleased with the way it has turned out. It’s bonkers… no one has ever done this before.”

Eiffel Tower

The aspiring artist now plans to do another sticky project - the first to recreate a huge Eiffel Tower out of tiny pieces of paper punched from French newspapers.

Nikki was one of around 1,000 students from Manchester Metropolitan University whose work was seen at the University’s annual Art and Design Degree Show.

She has had three offers to buy the work but says she hopes to exhibit it first at galleries across the country.