Cezanne's great mountain pictures made near the end of his life (like Wolf Kahn's early "white" paintings) are nearly impossible to photograph. Are as beautiful as jewels, need time to see properly. You cannot just glance at something like that and suppose that you are seeing it. Every touch is like a separate thought -- about color, about the air, about time, about the distance between him and the mountain. An art like that, what becomes of it in our rushed era?
How can we fool ourselves into thinking we care about nature when we don't even have the time to look at the sky?
Meanwhile, artists! Artists cheat themselves of the freedom that they could have. It begins with a freedom to examine your own life and a freedom to use your own ideas. It needs to be grounded in a resistance to other people telling you what art is.
Do we suppose that these others have superior authority upon which they draw their final word when they tell us what art is. Did someone tell Cezanne what art is? (He had his critics.)
The artist is the one who needs to be doing the telling. What genuine artist needs to be taken by the hand and told, "dear, we're not painting like that anymore."
We're not? Well, sweetheart, maybe I am.
If your art blossoms in conformity to the hip avant garde, and that's your heart, then fine. But if you just listen to the authorities in their hipness then somebody else is telling you what art is. Might as well let that person make the damned art.
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