Teaching forces an artist to consolidate one’s own education, experience and knowledge of art history into a focused exercise in order to help the student learn. My own philosophy of teaching is to craft exercises where the student will discover new things on his or her own. That is the scientist part of me. To help students learn composition and creating form, I had them reproduce one of Cézanne’s still lifes. I gave them a line drawing of Still Life with Apples to help them learn composition and how to define form with color and shading.
Cezanne was a Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th-century conception of artistic endeavor to a new world of art in the 20th century. He created space and depth of perspective by means of planes of color, which are freely associated and at the same time contrasted and compared. This was his way of translating and combining the observing eye of the artist and abstracting rather than reproducing nature. In so doing, he broke the rules of perspective and used this process to study the hypothesis of how to strip knowing from seeing—how to paint perception. During the last thirty years of his life, Paul Cézanne painted the same objects–the green vase, the rum bottle, the ginger pot, and the apples–over and over again. This, in my opinion, is truly experimental painting. His multiple paintings of the same subject matter were data in his experiments with shape, color, and lighting.
When my students painted this Cezanne still life, they were dealing with some of the same issues with which Cezanne experimented. Even though they were using line drawings of Still Life with Apples and had reference photos of the original and a watercolor painting I did myself as a demonstration shown here, they still the same issues distinguishing knowing from seeing. This was most pronounced when some students attempted to draw the perspective correctly rather than taking Cezanne’s approach. After they have the experience of not liking their outcome, they are more receptive to advice on seeing and how to look at what they are trying to paint.
