I spent all afternoon and most of the evening painting at Brooklyn Artists Gym; decided to do a large painting based on my study of trees in Paul Cezanne’s back yard, the one I did the first day I arrived in Aix-en-Provence 3 weeks ago today.

Here’s the painting - it’s done in Oil Pastel on Canvas and is something like 3 feet by 4 feet in size.

 

You know the study for this painting was Cezanne’s Back Yard, but the painting drew, somewhat, on the ideas I got back in Paris a couple of days before when I saw an exhibition of Pierre Klossowski at the Centre Pompidou.  Besides liking the drawings on paper (canvas to me) I found out that Pierre Klossowski was the brother of the painter Balthus.  While the sexual symbolism is not my thing - the feeling and quality of Klossowski’s work is my thing and decided, then and there, I would buy an expensive book (in French, no less) based on the exhibition, and find a way to use that insight in my painting when I got back to the New York.   And this painting of Cezanne’s Back Yard was my first attempt and using crayon, or Oil Pastel, on Canvas.

“..Pierre Klossowski, April 2-June 4, 2007 - The writer and philosopher Pierre Klossowski (1905-2001), a friend of Rilke and Georges Bataille, took up art on the prompting of Robert Lebel, André Masson and Alberto Giacometti. Centre Pompidou is to show drawings, prints and sculptures by Klossowski in Spring 2007. Klossowski also worked with a number of film directors, as writer or actor: with Pierre Zucca and Raoul Ruiz in the early 1970s and Pierre Coulibeuf, Michel Nuridsany and Alain Fleischer in the 1980s. A program of films in which Klossowski was involved will also be shown.”

While my inspiration may have started with Klossowski, it was mostly about my time in Cezanne’s last studio in Aix.   And here’s the movie I made just as got done working on this large painting - my hands all “green” with oily pastels, have drunk 4 glasses of Red Wine at an opening that happened at BAG last night - where I freely moved back and forth to the studio area and to the photography opening.

I was also thinking of the Van Gogh in the Clark Exhibition at the Metropolitan I saw the night before - how powerful it is (was).