Lessons from Cezanne

Sometimes reading a biography of an artist helps a great deal.  I have just finished the superbly detailed Cezanne: a Life by Alex Danchev, and  am still absorbing the many lessons about art practices, as lived and learnt during Cezanne's life.

Self Portrait with Rose Background, oil on canvas, Paul Cezanne, c. 1875.  Image courtesy of a Private Collection

One of the main lessons I derived from this biography and from other wonderful publications and exhibitions of Cezanne's work is that tenacity needs to be allied with a dogged belief in one's own artistic vision or voice.  Despite all his doubts and setbacks, Cezanne kept going back and back to certain subjects - apples, his beloved Mont Sainte-Victoire, self-portraits, etc.  Each time, he did something new, something inventive, something better, stronger and more personal.

Curtain, Jug and Fruit, oil on canvas, Paul Cezanne, 1894, Private collection

Another lesson that can be learned is how valuable it is to paint sur le motif as Cezanne called plein air painting.  He went out time and time again to work in the sun and heat or difficult conditions - he found new ways to render the landscape.  He told young painters, "The main thing in a painting is finding the right distance."  But finding the correct distance often meant a great deal of innovation, a break from previous, Renaissance traditions of what was far and what was near.  He collapsed distances, he gave us all licence to make horizontals and verticals indistinct one from the other, he showed that colour could serve as "all the ruptures in depth".  In essence, he allowed us all to become 20th/21st century artists who can paint in whatever way seems appropriate.

Mont Sainte-Victoire, oil on canvas, Paul Cezanne, 1897. Image courtesy of  Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore

Another vital lesson is that Cezanne looked and looked so hard at his subject - to find its "truth".  He was frantically absorbing all he could about what he was seeing, trying to understand it, trying to grapple with it so that he could mutate it onto his canvas.  "Cezanne at his easel, painting, looking at the countryside: he was truly alone in the world, ardent, focused, alert, respectful," as Renoir wrote. Every artist working from life needs to scrutinise the subject as carefully and attentively as possible - then, and only then, can one really hope to transmute it and interpret it according to oneself.

A lesson which resonates with me is Cezanne's passion for trees - pine trees and olive trees in particular.  He painted them again and again,  depicting them as one would depict a close friend, loved and carefully studied.  They were noble examples of Nature, which resonated so deeply with Cezanne. As Ravaisou is quoted as saying in  Cezanne a Life, "he was a sensualist in art.  He loved nature with a passion, perhaps to the exclusion of all else; he painted in order to prolong within himself the joy of living among the trees."  We can all learn from his paintings of the Large Pine and other tree paintings.

Large Pine and Red Earth, oil on canvas, Paul Cezanne (1890-95). Image courtesy of the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersbourg

Pistachio Tree at Chateau Noir, watercolour with graphite on cream wove paper, laid down on tan wove paper, Paul Cezanne.  Image courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago

Paint with passion - that is what, ultimately, Cezanne seems to be telling us with the art, writings and musings that we have all inherited.

More about Self-portraits

When I was writing recently about art being a form of self-portrait, a record of where each artist is in time and space and outlook in life, I remembered another statement, this time by Leonardo daVinci. He said, "Every painter paints himself. Painters seem to paint their own faces and make paintings that seem directly involved with their own life. " Indeed, there has been much speculation about many of Leonardo's portraits using his own features, such as this video of Siegfried Woldhek talking about his search for Leonardo's self-portraits. This image is the most famed, done between 1512-15 in red chalk, when Leonardo was in his sixties, a drawing in the Royal Library of Turin.

Self-Portrait, Leonardo da Vinci, 1512-15 in red chalk drawing (Image courtesy of the Royal Library of Turin)

The urge to record one's own existence, one's presence, has been with us humans since time immemorial. This form of saying "I exist, I am present", in visual fashion, is testimony to mankind's sense of community, of shared characteristics that are more important than their differences, at least at some moments in our history. One of the most amazing collections of human representations is apparently becoming better known and understood in recent years - the GwionGwion rock paintings in the Kimberly area in N.W. Australia. Not only are these rock paintings probably more than 40,000 years old, but they tell of human life and adventures in stunning, elegant fashion.

Tassel Bradshaw (Gwion Gwion) figures wearing ornate costumes

Bradshaw figure, ( courtesy of the Bradshaw Foundation).

As examples of artwork that reveals the artist's own experience, in "self-portraiture" style, there is a red rock painting of a boat, the earliest known in history, that tells of man's migration to Australia via a four-man canoe on the Gwion Gwion rocks.

Bradshaw boat people, 40,000 years ago

There is also another long panorama of four-legged, antlered animals that the artist had evidently seen during the migration from SE Asia. There are no such animals, now or in early times, in Australia.

Gwion Gwion (Bradshaw) paintings on a rock wall.

Gwion Gwion cave paintings in the Kimberely

This huge collection of rock paintings, in hostile, difficult and remote terrain is an astounding example of man recording existence, beliefs, and ceremonies from very early times that one author, Jo Lennan, describes as "a forgotten Eden". The name, Gwion Gwion, comes from a bird's name. The Aboriginal people recount that this bird pecked the rock with such force that its blood sprang forth and it used its bloodied beak and feather to delineate the elegant, dainty figures. Indeed, it is thought by today's experts that these long-ago artists actually used quills to make the fine lines on the rocks. The actual dates of these early artists' work are still being determined, because the pigments used to draw have become part of the rocks themselves, and carbon dating doesn't work, especially in the tropics where its limits of dating go back +-40,000 years. Nonetheless, apparently on top of one drawing, there is a fossilised mud wasp's nest, and optical luminescence (which dates when something last saw the light of the sun) allowed a date of about 17,500 years for the drawing. This means that these artists were telling of themselves and their world at the same time as their long-distant colleagues were painting the wonderful images of their immediate universe on the cave walls in Lascaux, France.

What marvels we all inherit when such artists create "self-portraits" of their personal worlds.

Art as Self-Portraits

Allison Malafronte, writing in October 2010 in American Artist, quoted the late wonderful artist, Timothy R. Thies, as saying, "The interesting thing is that I can go back to an image and remember exactly how I was feeling at the moment I painted it. In fact, every painting I do is a self-portrait, because they are all about where I am in my life at that specific moment."

I think that is such an accurate statement. I was storing away art that had returned from an exhibition this evening and moved some old drawing books to make space. I leafed though them quickly, and memories came flooding back. They were of different trips to parts of Europe - quick drawings of places, things that interested me, light effects - a myriad evocative scenes. In essence, each drawing was part of the continuous record of my being, my evolution through life, my interests and excitements.

Perhaps this continuous self-portraiture - de facto - is one of the most compelling reasons to be disciplined enough to keep a drawing journal. Writers keep written journals - and in fact, so do many artists. But the act of drawing is somehow different, and for an artist, immensely powerful as an aide-mémoire in its unadorned directness. Not only is one recording images that can perhaps serve later on for more sustained paintings or drawings, but each drawing tells of that particular moment in one's existence. Taking photographs is not quite the same - perhaps the mechanical click of the button to record the image is too quick and too easy to imprint the scene on one's mind in the same way as actually executing a drawing.

In fact, in one of the drawing books I was looking at this evening, I found some photographs that - very unusually - I had taken with my husband's camera. They were of some marvellous handmade wooden big reels of fishing line, lying on a quay in the Azores. I had drawn the reels a couple of times, but evidently wanted the colour images as well. My drawings brought back a flood of sensations - I could hear the sounds of the boatmen working on their vessels, the sound of the wind lapping the waves on the concrete harbour wall, the cool shade where I was standing. But the photographs conveyed none of those remembered sensations – they seemed "dead" and impersonal.

I am glad that I inadvertently had a trip down memory lane today. It validated the effort always to carry a drawing book with me when I travel.