painting apples

One thing about the old masters -- I'm looking at Cezanne -- is their humility and their tightly focused gaze. What if I want, like Cezanne, to paint apples that are vividly red-orange and that are also dark in the shadows, and put them against a porceline dish that has vilet markings, markings which one blurs so that you can tell they are decorations and yet have them become beautiful, vague and subtle abstractions of the real design of the porceline?

To have deep color effect and mood, but without detail. To invent an image that is as much a thought about the objects as it is a deeply perceptual recording of them.

If I wanted all that, where is the support for it? An art that requires time to slowly unfold, an art that stares at life and makes quiet, silent observations about things, an art that is like the novelist's art, that finds a humanity in things, standing in for absent actors. To have things in a penetrating arrangment where thoughts and feelings can hide.

The contemporary idea of art has turned its back on this. Calling it traditional, the critics of perceptual painting do not really understand the thing they dismiss. Certainly they do not see it's ever pliable use, how it is ever a reservoir of meaning. Yes, "traditional" art is hard to make into a modern idiom -- is easy as a temptation to fall into convention. But it's the failure of imagination that prevents traditional subjects from becoming new again. The subject is not at fault, nor is the basic approach. It's just that it's very difficult to do this, and it requires an artist of rare ability.

If an artist wants to test his or her own skill at invention, try painting something that has been painting over and over again through history. If you can make a still life of apples that has meaning and depth, you've done something. Because this easy subject is perhaps the hardest kind of thing to paint in an original way -- especially to make something original without descending into mannerism.