Cézanne (10)
Faith Ringgold at St. Tropez
Frederick Project: Colors and History
Friday, March 20, 2020
Thinking of intense experiences of color in the last few months. Immediately Faith Ringgold. Her painted canvas and quilt On the Beach at St. Tropez , from the series of twelve story-quilts The French Collection , which came as a revelation in the Smart Museum of Art’s show called Down Time: On the Art of Retreat this past fall. You walked into the gallery and were literally flooded with color. Ringgold paints on canvas [...] more
Cézanne Still and Blue
Frederick Project: To Resolve
Thursday, March 19, 2020
Today I’m going to work on how Cézanne’s blue resolves. One sense of resolve is to determine to go forward. Cézanne’s perennial project. Famous for destroying his canvases, for painting them out and scraping them off and beginning again, for going out on the road every day to set up his easel and work again at the view of the bay, the view of the mountain. Speaking to few, often frustrated, lonely. The resolve [...] more
Sophie's Painting
Sunday, July 30, 2017
My cousin Sophie is dying. She is ninety. It seems likely that she will die today, and I hurry to write those words to use the present tense one last time. We were with her, all of us, at different moments in the last couple of weeks. My mother is there now.
Sophie loved painting. She took painting classes in New York in the 1960s when she lived there, and there are still many of her paintings, some on squares of canvas with a cardboard backing, some directly on cardboard. [...] more
Lenses
Monday, January 4, 2016
Today I got new lenses for my glasses. After more than a month of squinting and blearing and pretending, my eyes knew themselves at last understood and the world came through with that almost bulging astonishing hyper-detail. Learn the task again. A half an hour, every few years, of seeing everything in the world at once.
I was running errands and had not planned to go to the Fogg, but, feeling my sudden seeing, I turned left. With which painting should I use this beautiful straining and adjusting sight? I [...] more
Degas Portrait Trio
Wednesday, February 26, 2014
At the MFA right now, a trio of Degas portraits are not to be missed. They can be stumbled upon in a narrow blue-green corridor on the second floor, next to the sealed off construction zone that is normally Impressionism. It is as if three of the finest musicians – one at the beginning of his career, one at the end – happened to all be passing through a town on the same night and to have the idea of playing some chamber music – and you happened to be staying at the hotel and to walk [...] more
Close Observation
Monday, January 20, 2014
A woman, long blue shirt carefully tied over striped skirt, sits in a red chair. She leans a little to her right, our left, elbow on the arm of chair. Her hands are folded. Cézanne’s way of painting faces means that you can look at them or not. Everything has surfaces and depths. Much of the meaning of the figure is not in the face. The folded hands are important and beautiful. Between the forefingers and thumbs are a green that relates [...] more
Trying to be Taught
Friday, September 13, 2013
Reading about the early years in the lives of the Impressionists – the period in the late 1850s and early 1860s when they began to arrive and to meet one another in Paris – I have been thinking about the necessity and difficulty of finding teachers. Unlike writing, the craft of painting has always been passed on in ateliers and schools. Sometimes it seems like every painter in the mid-17th century in the Netherlands spent a productive period in Rembrandt’s studio. Painting is an apprentice trade. You watch [...] more
Passages: Dewey
Tuesday, August 27, 2013
Here are two passages I've been struck by recently in reading John Dewey's Art as Experience . (Perigree Trade Paperbacks, Berkeley Publishing Group, Penguin, originally published 1934, edition August 2005 p84, p98. ) Throughout the book, Dewey argues that esthetic experience is a heightening of every day experience, that all experience has, immanently, the possibilities of order and understanding that are reached in esthetic experience. This continuity used to be more commonly felt and understood when many people were engaged in crafts, and when the arts had not become specialized, cordoned-off areas. [...] more
The Large Bathers II
Thursday, May 9, 2013
After I had been looking at the Large Bathers for a while, I noticed the swimmer. Clearly a figure: head, hair, flesh tones, mostly submerged, but swimming through the water. I saw that the painter had been careful to frame this figure, not only by the water's blue, but in the way that it is seen through the arms of the seated figures of the painting's center. One detailed hand is angled out right over the swimmer, almost pointing to it. Why was this degree of emphasis used? From the swimmer the eye [...] more
The Large Bathers
Sunday, April 21, 2013
Since my father’s death I’ve been twice to look at the Cézanne Large Bathers that our museum has borrowed from the one in Philadelphia. I might have gone more often but with the baby there hasn’t been so much time. It’s a vast painting – eight feet high and nine long. The wall text says its vault of tree trunks makes a cathedral and this is right, not merely architecturally. These tree trunks, along with a general impression of blue, and the gathered naked bathers, are the things you’re aware of before you know [...] more