Tom Keating On Painters - Cézanne

this week I would like to tell you a few odds and ends about Paul Cezanne it is said of says arm that he worked so slowly that he placed one piece of paint let us say every four hours it said so I can hardly believe that the parent it's quite true he spent literally days and weeks in making the conversation he would place a coin under something to raise it a bit and son everything was placed very carefully I've actually chucked us down in this centum just made a quick composition Paul Suzanne was born an ex in Provence in France in 1839 of a quite a wealthy families ver nouveau riche his father bought a banking firm he'd used a bit in the tailoring patterning business so um and became very rich because of this and he made Paul and allowance which enabled him to study art locally we endeavour to get into the echo Debose art and terrace but failed as indeed one could virtually say as a failure throughout the most of his life despite his connections because he knew Bernard and Gogol and Van Gogh and Camille Pissarro who taught him early on and the servant is the art of Impressionism of course Impressionism the technique of Impressionism is a delightful method of painting but of course it has its limitations because it's relatively easy to do I say that with all respect but it not enough for sir the intellectual mind of said man that says arm who want demanded more of it and I suppose because of his lack of fame and success early on row them relentlessly to express himself in a more abstracted form of painting now if you paint the shape itself in what is known as the local color that is the color of the object local color it creates the shape for you in flat pattern this little chap behind here hiding paint that in and this gives an idea generally over the whole painting of each of the component flat shapes Cezanne was into beador through the glass just like painting naked flourish under a costume life through the glass we poked the lemon very shape he lemon in the pure car and Cezanne was at great pains to emphasize not only flat shape but a spacial relationship we now come into the aesthetics of playing very complicated it's very difficult to teach is type of painting because unlike the academic painters I turn a council so forth he was at pains to create a new form of looking a new form of seeing therefore he used a technique of painting the whole thing right through Zuko's takes weeks but at the end of it there's a little peach here I'll give it a peach flat shape color but the jacent friends here there's the three balls of Lombardi the porn burkas he which reminds me that Cezanne didn't need porn bow cuz he was very very wealthy all his life and so for the whole of his life he could indulge himself in what it is playing about with painting in order to create a new form of art he didn't have to go to living at it of course in the drawing of the peach for example he would stop and draw the cloth around it very carefully this gives you an extra chance to redraw now I'm an old house painter and of course when young we were trained to what we called cut in and so obviously I am trained enough to either cut ground things but it's not a good thing thing to do in ordinary art in the sense of academic painting it's a very bad thing to cut in because there are no lines as such in nature and indeed it's a good thing to make ragged edges where you can and areas of color where there it should be white you you create the shadows in a brilliant series of adjacent tones we start off with a blue which is the opposite of the hot and then drag in some of the peach color into that because it bounces off color bounces off I'm doing it rather quickly but boorda speaking it's this kind of thing the warmth of the peach that old shadow is darkest at its source and it bleeds out into the weakness as it comes across so he would make the shape of the peach there deepening under there warmer where it touches the peach touches the tablecloth and bleeding out here because he would do this much slower more carefully that is the basic of it our painted little area around this bottle and the bottle itself just to give an idea of the color harmonies Cezanne was a diabetic this made him probably more taciturn than normally it was rather bad-tempered to put it simply a rather morbid man a morbid disposition he was of course married and madly in love with his art as many artists oven in his case he let his wife a bit of a you know difficult time because when she posed for him he said good god woman why can't you sit still like an apple I think this is after the 78 sitting or something but I have a feeling of course it was his illness that created this part of his nature he seemed to have her exercised hardly any ripple in the artistic world for many many years and eventually his work became famous when he exhibited finally at the salon with the Impressionists and without them and what about the odd write up and people started by his work so that finally he achieved the fame he'd wanted all his life unlike of course poor Vincent and many many other painters now I put what I've been yapping I put these kind of very crude colors here to show that in he would wash I've washed this Pearlie I'm not using oils or be honest because the joint are but the same thing applied I'm applying either towards the end of his life on his very famous in his famous still lives he painted in washes they would have been of course resin ether will what the varnish washes certain time lasts a long time of course saying was a water cut life and as we know paint it around Ling the white of the poor kam go through that he called bridges his bridges between one color and another and you can see here probably how the two colors are divided by a piece of white and of course this is the red apple here sir the same thing would apply there but he would have a bridge of white there now from a distance this registers and throughout a painting if you can keep this to a painting a watercolor or oil of this kinda painting you achieve a certain luminosity and a certain oneness with the whole thing it gives a a different aspect or to go them if you painted up close of course you break it it is the old master Technic actually of doing a bit and leaving a bit and you don't have to carry it right through but you see even Cottman the East Anglian Water Color poni he left bits Turner did but Cezanne was one of the few who carried this through unto until he died he was very fond of this particular quirk now it seems a lot of fuss over nothing but um if you look at his work in the Tate or the court order where he happened to be you will see that it does in fact register enormous Lee from a Sterns because he was absolutely determined to make everything as perfect as he could not that everything is perfectly round or cylindrical but it's just the base C's for the the formula he used now here we have I'm doing this very very quickly of course but here we have roughly the shape of the glass divided with wine glass bottle behind on our see-through and the stem and the whole thing is of course realized by the fact that this is transparent this is opaque so we paint this opaque watch the shape of the stem and that do it relatively can't have time to do it exactly right but you draw the shape of it in washes then you have to work out the reflected lights and in the actual wine you will have the belly I'll emphasize the belly of the wine comes down like that and that will echo down there into the tops while I'm on the subject of shapes Cezanne was influenced of course much by pier della Francesca whose picture the legend of the true cross has caused many series of frescoes of course and in Italy the figures are wearing wonderfully shaped hats and in this pier della Francesca who based his own work on the cone the five regular solids me pyramid cone was firm cube cylinder has used the shapes as abstract pattern the same as Cezanne would use in for instance painting the cloth emanating from here I observe there was a lion coming across here there's a shadow here from the glass it merges with the shadow from the bottle now he would do this with the utmost care I mean obviously I'm doing it arbitrarily just to demonstrate there's a line comes down here so we have now one rectangle bisected making a triangular shape this is very simply made and there's another one comes here echoed in this in the reverse sense so we have a rectangle bisected moreless will rather third to make this shape and he would paint this in I better use a large blaster to save time he would paint this in then let's call it blue the whitish bluish gray - that's to be about a week's work forces up with anyway very important of course in a painting is the foreground of a landscape or the fore part of course of a still life of this nature I'm painting that as quickly as possible let's say that is the tablecloth bit and there's a bit along here I've done this more or less purposely in shape form there's a little shape again down here we'll pretend this is a triangle will echo that with another triangle across here then with a little tone a little slightly different tone I do the piece in between now the reason I'm saying this and doing this is because those triangular as crude as they are shapes will echo and you don't already need to look through the picture there'll be an echo this shape here the shape here reversed and so on in order to break the monotony of this in the still life the tablecloth comes right down because there are many ways of doing this but in season as we were pretending to do a saison he has and has a predilection for painting the props he had in his studio like everyone else props and one of them of course they're quite well known as it seems to be something like a chest of drawers it's probably a painting table with a drawer and he would paint a color that he's very fond of roughly speaking at a 10 cover color now what we have of course is more or less this type of color what we have of course is the opportunity there in this shape here which is echoed so not only is a complementary shape it's broken and this shape echoes this shape in Reverse just as we've attended to the foreground the background must receive attended of vital importance that the colors in the painting of this kind which is really what one would almost call a decorative painting very derogatory term in a way but it is a decorative painting so we bring the colors from the background into the foreground and vice versa now I have already painted this one so a very quick painting but I designed a design so that this happened speaking this is the old trick of binding a picture together to give a counterbalance to all that's going on here we make a few little leaves or something up here just to create a little counterbalance of movement onto the blue pattern this painting is the second painting and has developed a very small amount relative to the way says our would have done it this'll probably total quite a while but I'd bang this in in a very crude way just to demonstrate that what appears to be irregular this is to say the perpendicular of this is off-balance perpendicular this counteracts it and so forth is because this is just to emphasize that in modern painting we're used to seeing abstractions by Cesare himself at the beginning of it by Picasso etc and we're so used to abstractions that we hardly realized that this man was an academic bounder Impressionists at one time was struggling to achieve something different it's very difficult to create a new form of seeing so the bottle is off the glass is off and he counteracts things through I've stated before that in the design he has got to kind of make a design out of the still life so he would emphasize very quietly little movements in the profile of the fruit here for instance then he would bring up let's say a leaf form to echo a lemon shape and healin gated titling that this is a very crude way of saying how his mind worked because I don't know that no one does but this is the kind of way he was struggling towards a new form of painting so having designed the painting he would then come back to the business of painting the painting in a very almost naive way of pure color you go now say to the lemon and make lemon shapes the lemon this one in particular there's no other lemon in the world exactly like this one it has its own nature its own volume its own shape its own being in fact it has its own personality this is the way he would look at it so he would look and look and look but I haven't the time here but and he would observe the nipple shape here the plain there of pure lemon color then he killed that lemon color a little warmth because it's coming near you remember in perspective again then he would remember that and that would come a little darker this next segment then under there of course would surprisingly become very light because of the echo of the tablecloth and if you look at Sue's arms you or any academic kind of that way you will observe the underbelly painting and the top painting not only is the underbelly necessary but the top light the lemon light if there is natural light above all from the side this will also be lightened hence the edge painting of before then the nipple bit will have a highlight and this will be blended in to create form broadly speaking that is a lemon as he would have taken probably a day to paint that and gradually thinking on these terms he achieves an approximation of the truth of what is painting the redness of the Apple will sing out like a beautiful note sung by a bird it's like constable he always introduced a little raid of poppies or boys out of something it's an old Dutch trick actually now with the application of paint which I'm putting on relatively slowly with one stroke in the whole of the picture Cezanne would decide and put one pure note here in this Apple for example a dominant red and would kill gradually killed by killing women de munition of thoth of strength the reds around it making this the one dominant bit towards the end of the painting of course we go into the lights and darks on the apricots they have of course bloom now bloom is a remarkably difficult color to put on because it's a as a pure scumble so you do that one them the paint's dry and you always peaches grapes normally in academic painting of course they're painted in the broadest sense in the old Victorian 18th century church they they paint them with an incredible thin whisper a kiss of air which represents the softness of the peach and can only be achieved by this soft gentle curve s of call / the warmth of the skin having done a bit that I must of course to carry this through we must remember this is a decorative type of painting and what we're doing in the foreground we need to take to the background and so forth to give the unity required to give aesthetic appeal we will help this dying creature here a little bit that was a bit too and a touch here and there in the fruit just a teeny-weeny touch to give it to take the harshness of where things and so on and of course it won't all once we find now this is in a good state for a coat of varnish in a really serious paint and that's about all I can do to this thank you very much from that Oh

Channel: buckwellm

Views: 88,825

Keywords: Tom Keating, Paul Cézanne (Visual Artist), Painting (Visual Art Form), Post-Impressionism (Art Period/Movement)

Id: Z4hcPI9ObNo

Length: 26min 6sec (1566 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 30 2015