"...nature has more to do with depth than with surfaces. I can tell you, you can do things to the surface.. ..but by going deep you automatically go to the truth. You feel a healthy need to be truthful. You’d rather strip your canvas right down than invent or imagine a detail. You want to know."
-Cézanne
"Painting is first and foremost an optical affaire. The stuff of our art is there, in what our eyes are thinking.. ..If you respect nature, it will always unravel its meaning for you."
-Cézanne
"a touch of green, believe me, is enough to give us a landscape, just as a flesh tone will translate a face for us.."
-Cézanne
"The people who tell you that the artist is always inferior to nature are idiots! He is parallel to it. Unless, of course, he deliberately intervenes. His whole aim must be silence. He must silence all the voices of prejudice within him, he must forget.. ..And then the entire landscape will engrave itself on the sensitive plate of his being."
-Cézanne
"Colour is the place where our brain and the universe meet. That’s why colour appears so entirely dramatic, to true painters"
-Cézanne
Painting from nature is not copying the object, it is realizing sensations.
-Cézanne
"This will be my picture, the one I shall leave behind.. ..But the centre? Where is the centre? I can’t find the centre.. ..Tell me, what shall I group it all around? Ah, Poussin's arabesque! He knew all about that. In the London ‘Bacchanal’, in the Louvre ‘Flora’, where does the line of the figures and the landscape begin, where does it finish.. ..It’s all one. There is no centre. Personally I would like something like a hole, a ray of light, an invisible sun to keep an eye on my figures, to bathe them, care them, intensify them....in the middle."
-Cézanne
(remark on ‘The Bathers’)
This is great. Dovetails really nicely with some things I've been thinking about!
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