Today, we got back into a regular schedule of studying famous artists and composers. We had the pleasure of starting out with studying about the French artist, Paul Cezanne.

 Self Portrait, 1875-1877 

There were two main lessons that we learned from researching about Cezanne. First, here is a quote from a letter that he wrote to his childhood best friend Emile Zola. And it won't be surprising to you all why I love it so much.

"...all the pictures painted inside, in the studio, will never be as good as those done outside. When out-of-door scenes are represented, the contrasts between the figures and the ground is astounding and the landscape is magnificent."

When my daughter read this in a book today, she announced how appropriate that was for us! Cezanne's preference was to place himself in front of nature, painting at the scene.

The second lesson we learned was to be true to who you are as an artist. Cezanne was ahead of his time; his artwork was unlike the typical realistic, 3-D art of the time. He was different, he wanted his paintings to have a more flat appearance with varied perspectives. Despite critics being really tough on his different methods Cezanne stayed true to who he was as an artist right up until he passed away. And it was only after then that his artwork started to get noticed and became famous.

My daughter has a different style to the way she does art, she likes to do everything to look animated, like cartoons. After learning about Cezanne today she proclaimed, "That's the way I feel when I try to draw something very realistic like a lot of artists do, I feel weird and I can't ever be happy with it. But when I do it the way I like to, I'm always pleased with what I do."

Next Tuesday for our Art lesson I will challenge her to paint a still life (Cezanne did many still life paintings) or a nature scene outside, giving it her style, making it her own. I'll post about that then.

In the meantime, here are two excellent books on Paul Cezanne that we used and that I recommend, as there is much more to learn about him!

                                  

Also, here is an online gallery of his works:

www.abcgallery.com/C/cezanne/cezanne.html

Warning - as with just about all artists of that time, there are some explicit paintings.