“Once, I lived on the tarred lonely highways of truth –
Slugging towards the looming horizons – the promised dwelling places for those who did not waver. The whole world was about being either right or wrong. I was either lost or found.
That was many years ago though.
Today, when I (meet people) paint paintings, I recognize how utterly beyond right and wrong they are – how (their lives) they are symphonies beyond orchestration, how mistakes and failings are actually cosmic explorations on a scale grander and of a texture softer than our most dedicated rule-books could possibly account for.
You see, something happened on my way – and I lost my coordinates, my map, my directives.
Now the whole journey is the destination – and each point, each barren point, just as noble as the final dot. Every splotch of (ink) paint is become to me a fresco of wisdom, a beehive of honey, a lovely place – and every aching (voice) brushstroke a heavenly choir.
The world is no longer desolate and empty and exclusive; she is now a wispy spirit, whose fingers flirt through the wind – a million roads where only one once lay.
And I need not be certain about the road travelled – since I arrived the self-same moment I set out.”
Bayo Akomolafe, adapted: the brackets indicate Bayo’s original words.
It seems to me right and fitting to interpret these words of Bayo Akomolafe, modern day wordsmith of poetry on paper as if spoken by Paul Cezanne, artist of oil-paint on canvass: for the experience they describe in their different communication mediums seems to me to be the same, despite being one hundred and twenty-five years apart.
On the 25th May, 1895, Cezanne met Pissarro in the Durand-Ruel gallery in Paris to behold the series of Monet’s paintings of Rouen Cathedral.
Monet admitted to being obsessed with this motif, so extraordinary had he found the portrayal of the effect of light at different times, different days and different seasons. He had chosen a dozen of the twenty plus Rouen paintings for the gallery; and his two old Impressionist comrades were duly wowed!
Pissarro, personally, had by this time moved on from Impressionist painting to follow his students and paint in the mode of ‘pointillism’, as it would come to be called.
Cezanne, earlier that same year, before leaving Aix for Paris, had finished a painting of Bibemus Quarry, and had just started another of the same motif.
All three were searching anew: but, unlike Monet and Pissarro, who were searching within different modes of expression, Cezanne had ‘lost his coordinates, his map, his directives’; and this fracture enabled him, through the other side of the pain, to discover the stages of his own growth, such that in this, his mature phase, his paintings would become ‘symphonies beyond orchestration’. Cezanne’s development became generative.
I offer this first of three paintings called ‘Bibemus’ (FWN 305) as Cezanne’s expression of the beauty inherent in Impressionism; a second called ‘Bibemus Quarry’ (FWN 306) as an expression of the truth inherent in his ‘constructive phase’; and a third called ‘Mont Sainte Victoire seen from Bibemus’ (FWN 315), as an expression of the values inherent in his final, generative phase. All three Cezanne painted in a two-year period: 1895 – 1897.
Bibemus FWN 305 46.3cm x 55cm 1894/5 Barnes Foundation
There’s a joyfulness about Impressionist landscape painting; as if they say - “hey, we’re just going to paint the stuff of ordinary life, because that’s where beauty lies. And we’re going to paint it in a way that offers an invitation for you to feel the rich atmosphere that we paint. We’re not interested in the precise detail of the motif; we’re not interested in attaining such a polished finish that you can’t see the paint. We want to be raw, honest and simple, rich and vibrant, joyful and inclusive.” Their higher purpose was in remembering that beauty is the beholding of the graciousness of ordinary life; how freeing that sensation was, encapsulated in paint on canvass, panoramas of our earth in sunshine and breeze.
Here is Cezanne, twenty years after the Impressionists made their mark in history, celebrating the essence of their achievement. This is how we did it!
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Bibemus Quarry FWN 306 65cm x 80cm 1895 Folkwang, Essen
“The interlocking and interpenetration of planes and volumes presents one of the most complex and perfectly integrated examples (of pictorial construction) in Cezanne’s work” Erle Loran: diagrams in Cezanne’s Composition.
This is how Cezanne expressed in paint on canvass the truth of the new and exciting, liberating and progressive era which we now call modernism.
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Mont Sainte Victoire seen from Bibemus FWN 315 65.1cm x 81.3 1897 Baltimore
We can see how Cezanne has encountered, and included, a number of different world-views: the Traditional worldview (his ‘avec couillard’ phase); the worldview often referred to as Modernism (which was just beginning to manifest); and the worldview that would begin with Existentialism (which some now call simply ‘post-modernism’, but which is more clearly named ‘pluralism’ – which was foreshadowed in Cezanne’s work).
There is such a beauty in discovering your own development. The truth within the beauty of discovering your own development is that you are lifted up beyond your own development. The goodness within the truth of discovering the beauty of your own development is liberatingly expansive, awesome, and humbling.
I have made a great discovery. I no longer believe in anything. Objects don't exist for me except in so far as a rapport exists between them and myself. When one attains this harmony, one reaches a sort of intellectual non-existence, what I can only describe as a sense of peace, which makes everything possible and right. Life then becomes a perpetual revelation. That is true poetry.
Georges Braque
We are now beginning to see, as Cezanne began to see, in that quarry, that the spaciousness of our living is interlocking and interdependent, complex and integrated, interactive and creative: in a word, generative. We are beginning to be Integral.
The poetry of mimetics is the active contemplation of our fractal universe.
For more insights into ‘Integral’, try one of the following sites:
Quick Intro to Integral Theory - The Daily Evolver