On Monday night I was walking home just before dusk and was caught up with how magical everything looked, especially the clouds.  Lately I’ve been sketching whenever I can - it balances out my Web Analytics work and keeps me rooted in what I fundamentally aim, an artist.

In fact, I’d challenge anyone tell me that eyes of an artist aren’t needed in almost any field.  I was at my doctor’s office on a routine visit and I noticed how many people were calling for advice and consultation.  I asked the doctor how he managed to deal with so many people on know what to say over the phone.  The doctor replied: I like to talking to people over the phone, I get to know them and I can pick up things about how they’re doing and what they need just by talking to them.

Especially today, with so much data, so many inputs, so much information hitting us from all sides and even though time and space …. the ability to synthesize, to filter out, to abstract and get the essential meaning ….. it vital in Medicine, as is in Art.

That’s why, when I visited France last month, and stood in front of Cezanne’s mountain in Aix-en-Provence, I remembered how he took in all the data - all that information -and made it his own.   Slavish imitation is not Art…any more than a Doctor rattling off a bunch of medical tests and diagnosis ….. what you want for Doctors and Artists …. is the story….the synthesis … the meaning of what you there for.

Fundamentally, Art is about “seeing” - it always was and it always will be; everything else grafted on it may be valid, or not, but it’s the vision thing….the Artist “sees”…..and that’s where the synthesis arises.

Also, after reading The World Vision of Paul Cezanne and Delacroix’s Journal, I can say that Art about feelings that can’t be verbalized - the images are but heliographs into the feelings of the Artist.

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).

I decided to try something different today and painted a large painting/study from an oil pastel sketch I did in Aix-en-Provence last week.

The painting is about 3 or 4 feet long by 2 or 3 feet high (don’t know the exact measurements) and was based on the study in this post Leaving Aix-en-Provence and Traveling back to NYC - Last Aix Post.

I made a video on my thoughts about this painting  (see above).