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”Paul Cézanne” wrote: Make others feel the same way about it. Without their realizing it! That's the meaning of art. Yes, what I'm aiming for is the logical development of what we see and feel when we observe nature; only then I'm concerned with the process, processes being for us no more than simple ways of getting the public to feel what we ourselves are feeling, and of making our point. The great artists we admire have done no more. Shall we have lunch?
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As with the old masters, for Cézanne the basis of painting was drawing, but the prerequisite for all work was subordination to the object, or the eye or pure looking: "All the painter’s intentions must be silent. He should silence all voices of prejudice. Forget! Forget! create silence! Be a perfect echo… The landscape is reflected, becomes human, thinks in me… I climb with her to the roots of the world. we germinate A tender excitement seizes me and from the roots of this excitement then rises the juice, the colour. I was born in the real world. I see!.. In order to paint that, then, the craft must be used, but a humble craft that obeys and is ready to transmit unconsciously."
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”Paul Cézanne” wrote: Treat nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere, and the cone, the whole put into perspective so that each side of an object, or of a plane, leads towards a central point. Lines parallel to the horizon give breadth, whether a sections of nature, or, if you prefer, of the spectacle which Pater omnipotens aeterne Deus unfolds before your eyes. Lines perpendicular to this horizon give depth. Everything I am telling you [Joachim Gasquet] about - the sphere, the cone, cylinder, concave shadow – on mornings when I'm tired these notions of mine get me going, they stimulate me, I soon forget them once I start using my eyes.
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”Paul Cézanne” wrote: With a little bit of temperament one can manage to be a painter. It's enough to have a sense of art, and that sense is no doubt what the bourgeoisie fear most. For a painter, sensation is at the bottom of everything. I will go on repeating it forever. Procedures are not what I advocate.
”Paul Cézanne” wrote: That's my great ambition. To be sure! Every time I attack a canvas, I feel convinced, I believe that something's going to come of it. But I immediately remember that I've always failed before. Then I taste blood. I never know where I am going or where I want to go with this damned profession. All the theories mess you up inside.
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”Paul Cézanne” wrote: In my ideal of a good painting; there's unity. The drawing and the color are no longer distinct; as soon as you paint you draw; the more the colors harmonize, the more precise the drawing becomes. I know that from experience. When the color is at its richest, the form is at its fullest.
In his 1945 essay entitled "Cézanne's Doubt", Merleau-Ponty discusses how Cézanne gave up classic artistic elements such as pictorial arrangements, single view perspectives, and outlines that enclosed color in an attempt to get a "lived perspective" by capturing all the complexities that an eye observes. He wanted to see and sense the objects he was painting, rather than think about them. Ultimately, he wanted to get to the point where "sight" was also "touch". He would take hours sometimes to put down a single stroke because each stroke needed to contain "the air, the light, the object, the composition, the character, the outline, and the style". A still life might have taken Cézanne one hundred working sessions while a portrait took him around one hundred and fifty sessions. Cèzanne believed that while he was painting, he was capturing a moment in time, that once passed, could not come back. The atmosphere surrounding what he was painting was a part of the sensational reality he was painting. Cèzanne claimed: "Art is a personal apperception, which I embody in sensations and which I ask the understanding to organize into a painting.”
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Ernest Hemingway compared his writing to Cézanne’s landscapes. As he describes in A Moveable Feast, I was "learning something from the painting of Cézanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimensions that I was trying to put in them”.
