Cottages in Auvers-sur-Oise in winter FWN 67 1873 61cm x 50
The trouble with bends in the road is that your eye concentrates on manoeuvring round the bend: your focus is looking down, along the road, leaving the horizon way off in the distance. If you reproduce this exactly as a photographic copy, you end up with a huge hole at the top of the painting, with nothing but sky. Cezanne tries various techniques for overcoming this problem, but his two favourite ones are to augment the bend in the road, and secondly, to raise up the middle ground to fill more space before we see the sky. In this particular painting, the bend in the road is so abrupt that it seems to tilt around to the right, a bit like a race-track! And the sky is reduced in its size on the right, by the trees, and on the middle left, above the horizontal line of the roofs, by a horizontal strip of brownish blue, and above that by swirling browns that reach the same height as the trees on the right. The swirling light browns look a bit like clouds, but the brownish blues are not easily identified with anything: maybe trees?. The effect is to diminish what otherwise would be a mass of blue. These ‘plastic’ techniques are explained because artists are trying to represent three dimensional space on a two dimensional canvass.
The trouble with curves of development is that you have to jump off before you reach the full potential: Don’t wait till you’re over the top! “The sigmoid curve is an S-shaped curve on its side, and is often used in business to speak about future projections; it is the line of all things human, of our own lives, of organizations and businesses, governments and empires, democracy, and many and varied institutions. What varies is the length of the curve: Empires maybe 400 years, some more, some less; businesses used to last 40 years on average, now it is 14; human beings seem to be heading for 90 years.” (Charles Handy) There is the initial investment, ‘inception’, when the input exceeds the output, expressed as the downward slope of the curve; then there is a rise in output, ‘growth’, as the curve rises, and reaches a peak, ‘maturity’; then there’s the descent, ‘decline’, a downward slope towards extinction. The second curve, represented by the dotted line, shows how hard it can be for human beings, and organizations to change before it’s too late. It’s so tempting to continue on the same curve, in growth, in the same direction, when we’re doing so well – but that’s the road to extinction! If you want to live a full life, you have to surf!
Cezanne is surfing the lighter palette of this Impressionist period, out and about with Pissarro, trying different techniques; and playing with geometric forms combined with the natural shapes of the countryside. We see again his use of the “V” - this time upside down - in the centre of his painting; his use of colour repetition to link different parts together - the golden brown of the sky with that of the earth of the road; the red of the roof and that of the far left chimney-pot; the fuzziness of the foliage of the bottom right and the sharpness of the ensemble of roofs on the left.
Cezanne is enjoying himself; Pissarro is no doubt making suggestions; Cezanne is learning the Impressionist Technique. He seems happy enough with this painting, and I like it too: it reminds me of gentle walks with friends and family after Christmas dinner. Cezanne has signed the painting in the bottom left; so he probably paid for lunch with it at the newly opened Auberge Ravoux d’Auvers. And why not!
“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write,
but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”
Alvin Toffler, 1970, futurist.