Thinking About Cezanne

CHRISTOPHER SCHINK

thinking about Cezanne

Nobody thinks about Paul Cezanne today. Or, at least, not much. Contemporary art has moved to places Cezanne would never recognize. And even non-objective painting, often referred to as Modern Art is now almost 75 years old and slightly threadbare. Paul Cezanne has often been called the Father of Modern Art. His innovations—the subtle flattening of form and space, multiple viewpoints, and distortion of shapes—were an inspiration to Picasso and Braque and led to their invention of Cubism. Later artists such as Diebenkorn. Kitaj, Johns, and Hockney found inspiration from Cezanne’s work.

My thoughts

Working off and on a series of semi-abstract landscapes in watercolor, I realized that Cezanne was constantly in the back of my mind. He was, and remains, one of my favorites and I continue to be intrigued by his treatment of form and space and his subtle reliance on geometry. Today his work might seem conventional, constrained, and dry when compared to the more exuberant work of his contemporaries: Monet. Renoir, Gauguin, and Van gogh. But I continue to find his work inspiring and instructive. Here’s how.

Cezanne’s thoughts

Cezanne instinctively flattened the form and pictorial space in his paintings, but not too much. He wanted his objects to appear round, but not too round; his space to appear flat, but not too flat. He didn’t have a formula for this. He simply pounded away until he achieved the effect he wanted. By studying his paintings we can discover some of the devices he employed. Here are some I have used: 1. Flattening space by repeating color and intensity and brush stroke size in foreground and background. By turning Cezanne’s painting (right) upside down, you can see this effect. 2. Flattening form by slightly distorting perspective and reducing the contrast between light and shadow (see farmhouse in painting below).

3. Cezanne arranged objects in his compositions as if viewed in a picture box or stage set (see painting middle right and illustration directly right). He viewed these objects as running parallel to the picture plane (see right). He arranged objects in a contained space that lead the viewer’s eye into the composition and back out (see arrows, right). Cezanne worked intuitively, never analyzing or stating his innovations in the treatment of form and space. To better understand his approach, search out Cezanne’s Composition by Erle Loran, first published in 1943 and still in print today.

My thoughts

There is a small creek overshadowed by trees running behind my house that provides me with interesting painting material. After winter rains it fills with water. I often stop while walking my dog along the path that follows the creek to take a few photos to refer to later in my studio. In an early attempt (left), a full-sheet watercolor modified with acrylics, I tried to capture the dark, shaded feeling of the scene by emphasizing the geometry of the subject and flattening the space with repetition of neutral color.

“This emphasis on linear movement is evident in all my work.”

Linear movement

Using a Cezanne-derived device, I try to weave together a rhythmic pattern of the edges of shapes to create a cohesive design (see illustration below.) This emphasis on linear movement is evident in all my work.

Color choices

I started this painting in watercolor and then added acrylic. I took a color approach often used by Cezanne in his still lifes: a predominance of neutrals with smaller areas of intense color for contrast and interest. The opacity of acrylics allow me to add clean, bright color over grayed, muted areas. I also employed watercolor crayons or small additions of gouache for the same purpose.

You can flatten a shape by by not modeling with strong light and shadow patterns

Creating interest

You can flatten a shape by not modeling with strong light and shadow patterns, but the result is often uninteresting. To remedy this, you can treat the interior with texture or changes of color (without changes in value), thus creating interest. To suggest the crowded creek and overhanging trees without including a strong shadow pattern, I painted the trees almost entirely black and then added color changes.

Light and shadow

The next three paintings were based on photos taken on a trip to Tuscany. The subject matter with its tile-roofed farmhouses, of course, triggered thoughts of Cezanne. In the painting on the left, because of the passive white shapes of the building, I added a roof overhang and a shadow for more interest. On the painting below I tried to put the emphasis on the cypress trees (they’re perfect for my geometric stylization) and added a very light shadow to the building. The painting on the next page is the most abstract and stylized of the three. I find that each subsequent version of a subject becomes more abstracted and stylized, less what I saw and more what I imagined.

“. . .each subsequent version becomes less what I saw and more what I imagined.”

Technical note

All of these paintings were started in watercolor on 22" x 30" Arches 300# or 400# rough paper with some additions in crayon, gouache, or acrylic.

Imitate, borrow and adapt

We all have artists from the past, like Cezanne or Picasso or Wyeth, that we admire or are influenced by present day painters or instructors. But it’s not enough to simply appreciate your favorite’s work or imitate its surface appearance; as an evolving artist, you must analyze and understand what that artist is doing and why. You might gain insights by consciously copying an admired artist’s work. Picasso encouraged copying other artists’ work because, he said, “You always make a hash of it and so find out who you really are.” By carefully examining an artist’s approach, you’ll find there are things you like and things you don’t. There are things that you might borrow—particular use of color, or line, or treatment of form—and adapt to your own approach to painting.

Who are you?

Our paintings should reflect who we are—our interests and feelings, our view and response to the world around us. To achieve this we gather ideas, techniques, and concepts from artists we admire. We might start with imitation and then keep the things we like and abandon what we don’t. We borrow from the artists we admire, the artists who seem to be on the same track as our own, the artists who have a solution to the problems that challenged us. We take a pinch from here and a dab from their to create our own recipe that we can apply to subjects that interest us. By examining, analyzing, and borrowing from the artists we admire we produce an amalgam that is recognizably our own. So get out your art books, search on the Internet, and start thinking about your favorite artists. n