Sayings from the World View of Paul Cezanne - Understanding your painting style
Note: This post was created before my Paris Trip and I never got around to posting it. When I left Aix on Thursday morning, I gave Marsha Wooley my copy of the World View of Paul Cezanne, as I had finished the book.
When I looked at Cezanne’s paintings while in Paris, or when I was in Aix, I did not really find I could get anything directly, any additional insight, as a result of reading The World View of Paul Cezanne. I’m not saying that I think it’s authentic or not …. I really don’t know for sure.Â
Enjoy the post anyway for what you can get out of it.
I was stuck by this statement by The World View of Paul Cezanne by Jane Roberts that spoke to me today:
“..On the rarest of occasions, a painting may run away from the artist, but he follows it so alertly and faithfully that in a flash his technique grows and develops so that a single inch of canvas shows a development that otherwise might not have occurred at all.
  Generally, however, there must be a delicate balance between the painting and the artist, in which the artist works upon the painting like a force of nature and it responds, reacting itself as its elements are gradually built up. That is, in the reality of the canvas, the strokes, colors, shapes, values, and so forth will react to the artist’s manipulations in the same way that rocks and natural objects will react to the wind, light and temperature.”
Page 106 -Entry 18 - January 12th, 1976 - excerpted from from The World View of Paul Cezanne by Jane Roberts
“… These artist’s tracks are the tracings of the mind in paint, the neurological tracings of the emotions on canvas, as the brush faithfully follows the inner nuances of the artist’s life and sensations; and those tracings, I believe, will naturally seek to express themselves in shapes that are also found in nature. That is, as the wind makes certain characteristic tracings in the sand, forming the patterns we consider natural rather than artificial, so the brushstrokes will also form patterns on the canvas that are natural in the same fashion. Further, I believe that these natural patterns or shapes reflect or mimic inner forms which all objects are made.”
   From these basics, the artist elaborates and creates; building up images from the springboard of those neurological tracings; so that each brushstroke must be alive and wiggly as if a living thing were being transferred to the canvas. A limp brushstroke is far worse than none, for it will deaden all around it. Yet the artist must learn though self-examination when and how to apply his strokes, and in this matter there is no one in the world, dead or alive, that he can copy.”
Page 103 -Entry 17 - January 11th, 1976 - excerpted from from The World View of Paul Cezanne by Jane Roberts
To me, this says the artist becomes - any teacher can only take an art student so far - for example,  there are things I am experiencing, as I paint, that no one taught me, or could teach me - as Life itself - is the Teacher.
But that’s why, following anyone who you admire, too closely, can be the death of your own creativity - and that would be as true even if I followed Cezanne in a slavish way; the real value of a guide is to awaken your own creativity.
