Paul Cezanne
Paul Cezanne
Paul Cézannewas a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th-century conception of artistic endeavour to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century. Cézanne's often repetitive, exploratory brushstrokes are highly characteristic and clearly recognizable. He used planes of colour and small brushstrokes that build up to form complex fields. The paintings convey Cézanne's intense study of his subjects...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionPainter
Date of Birth19 January 1839
CityAix-en-Provence, France
CountryFrance
Here on the edge of the river, the motifs are very plentiful, the same subject seen from a different angle gives a subject for study of the highest interest and so varied that I think I could be occupied for months without changing my place, simply bending a little more to the right or left.
If I think, I am lost.
You must think. The eye is not enough; it needs to think as well.
The landscape thinks itself in me and I am its consciousness.
What is one to think of those fools who tell one that the artist is always subordinate to nature? Art is a harmony parallel with nature.
People think how a sugar basin has no physiognomy, no soul. But it changes every day.
Art first of all is optical. That's where the material of our art is: in what our eyes think.
It is impossible for emotion not to come on us in thinking of that time now flowed away.
When I start thinking, all is lost.
The landscape becomes human, becomes a thinking, living being within me. I become one with my picture...we merge in an iridescent chaos.
Shut your eyes, wait, think of nothing. Now, open them ... one sees nothing but a great coloured undulation. What then? An irradiation and glory of colour. This is what a picture should give us ... an abyss in which the eye is lost, a secret germination, a coloured state of grace ... loose conciousness. Descend with the painter into the dim tangled roots of things, and rise again from them in colours, be steeped in the light of them.
Tell me, do you think I'm going mad? I sometimes wonder, you know.
If I think, everything is lost.
Painting is damned difficult - you always think you've got it, but you haven't.