Gratitude: Sunday Artists

Today is 12/02/2021, the 162nd birthday of French pointillist painter Georges Seurat. His most well-known painting, A Sunday Afternoon On The Island of La Grande Jatte, was the inspiration for Sunday In The Park With George, the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical with music and lyrics by another iconic artist, Stephen Sondheim, who passed away just six days ago. Sondheim, himself, described art in rather spiritual terms: “It’s eternal. It’s infinite…It just has no beginning and no end. It’s just one thing.” It’s no surprise, then, that he referred to Sunday In The Park With George as the work in his catalogue that was “closest to [his] heart.” Now, we are here in this poetic moment where the universe conspired to align Sondheim’s death so closely with the anniversary of Seurat’s birth. And while the artists are no longer with us, the humanity they observed in an ordinary Sunday on an island in the river will live forever through color, light, and music. That’s art, ladies and gentlemen.

In token of my gratitude for these artists, I made this little tribute which, by no means, has anything near the elegance of Seurat or Sondheim, but it is, indeed, a celebration of the same subject. It’s the same word in a different signature pulsing through the artistic universe: Sunday.