Vue de Louvenciennes, Pissarro-style by Cezanne FWN 63 1872 73cm x 92
Louvenciennes by Camille Pissarro 1871 90cm x 116.5
Language is such a beautiful thing! How I love to watch young children develop their expressiveness; first come nouns – the names of things, objects; and then verbs – the action words, which allow for making connections and relationships. This movement is the young human being moving through the evolutionary process that it took our ancestors thousands of years to achieve; this particular process is towards cognition – it’s the way we know stuff. This movement of going from expressing yourself with nouns to expressing yourself with verbs and nouns, seems to me to have been the same kind of development that the Impressionists discovered and delighted in! It was their joy! It was as if ‘art’, the famous art in the prestigious museums and galleries, was all about expressing yourself in nouns; painting objects, yes – albeit in minute and exquisite detail – but nonetheless objects, in a fixed and unchanging world, in exact proportions and perspective; wham, there it is! What freedom was theirs when the Impressionists realized that they could express experiences, which included ‘objects’ but went further to include the relationships between them; and the fleeting events in a developing changing world; whirl, here we go!
Pissarro’s son, Lucien, recounts later: “You know that Cezanne did most powerful black pictures until he came to see us in 1870: my father then explained to him what he was doing. Cezanne, in order to realize his meaning, asked father to lend him a picture to copy. The copy was very fine, and quite different from father’s model – Cezanne always did that – his copy was a free one, he copied everything except the actual execution.” I like to play “Spot the differences” with these two painting of which Lucien was speaking: the top slightly smaller one by Cezanne, and the bottom larger one by Pissarro: I even get out my ruler and set square. Cezanne’s is somehow kind of closer to you: for instance, the woman and child seem nearer to us in Cezanne’s painting, whereas in Pissarro’s, they seem further down the road. In Cezanne’s, the three trees on the left are more defined, they seem closer together in a little triangle, the first tree seems to lean back away from the road as an invitation to come on into the painting, and that invitation is carried on as their base is longer and comes towards you, the foliage underneath the first one is brushed away, so there’s no hindrance in our way. In Cezanne’s, the top of the wall on the right is not straight but concave: circles are always more inviting than straight lines, though not as ‘truthful’….maybe? ( or perhaps they express a more rounded truth?).
When the Impressionists tried to understand what they were doing, it involved a kind of “unlearning” of the way we see stuff; maybe ‘deconstruction’ is what we’d say nowadays. The ‘picture’ they had of how ‘seeing’ works was that the light off an object hit the eye, and then the mind translated that ‘impression’ using our learned thought processes, using all the concepts and rationality that is the skill and function of our mind, our cognition. What the impressionists thought they were doing was to paint that first ‘impression’ (when the light hits on the eye), before it was interpreted by the mind.
The awareness of the activity of the mind,
the benefits of quietening the mind and being still,
and the possibility of thereby achieving union of subject and object
this is I believe what the Impressionists, and Cezanne in particular, began to experience.
It happens, also, to be the first step in the path of meditation, and mindfulness.
I go among trees and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet
around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie in their places
where I left them, asleep like cattle…..
After days of labour, mute in my constellations
I hear my song at last
and I sing it.
As we sing, the day turns
and the trees move.
Wendell Berry (adapted)