to
e now embark on a fourth and final trip through the Getty's
Still Life with Blue Pot: this time in depth, into and through the layers of pencil and watercolor and back out again. Once again this trip will require patience, for this time we shall look at the watercolor still life archaeological ly: digging with our eyes into the artist's working process, from the top level of reinforcing Prussian blue down through the thinner colors and through the tangle of lines laid over and under those colors to the paper beneath. This is an imaginative excavation, however, rather than an art detective's
Detail 8
fact-finding mission; it will not reconstitute Cezanne's procedure step by step in any
dialogue among paper, pencil, watercolor,
exact or linear way, for his way of working in
and objects in space, it offers a journey
hypothesized pencil point and watercolor brush and the strata of graphite and pigment
through the studio in microcosm: through its
left by them.
such a reconstruction. Rather, this "dig" will
objects but also through its means, as those means create and at the same time search
We cannot look only in depth, of course, or localize that looking in one area of the
try to re-create what Cezanne might have
unceasingly for their ends. And so the state-
drawing, one part of the watercolor. Indeed,
done according to what the viewer's eye is encouraged to see in different parts of the
of-the-art conservator's and photographer's technology to which we have subjected this
steps to and from a starting point. And dif-
drawing-painting (it is a mix of both) and in different kinds of viewing campaigns. For this
work, available neither to Cezanne himself nor to the layman viewer of our time, will be
ferent parts of Still Life with Blue Pot suggest different kinds of in-depth looking. We are
is a still life in watercolor that solicits from the viewer a comprehensive and empathic
used only to enhance what the naked eye
encouraged, by habit as much as by Cezanne,
sees, feels, and gropes toward, what it senses
to look first at the rough center of the large,
engagement in the artist's eye-and-hand
lying beneath its imagined fingertips, its
uncut sheet of machine-made Montgolfier
his late years, especially in fully orchestrated compositions like this one, pits itself against
Detail 7
103 PENCIL LINES AND WATERCOLORS
we will have to circle around and retrace our