A Quote by Henri Matisse

Cezanne, you see, is a sort of God of painting. — © Henri Matisse
Cezanne, you see, is a sort of God of painting.
You have bits of canvas that are unpainted and you have these thick stretcher bars. So you see that a painting is an object; that it's not a window into something - you're not looking at a landscape, you're not looking at a portrait, but you're looking at a painting. It's basically: A painting is a painting is a painting. And it's what Frank Stella said famously: What you see is what you see.
When I am in a painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after a sort of 'get acquainted' period that I see what I have been about. I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc, because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.
Mount Tamalpais became my house. For Cezanne, Sainte-Victoire was no longer a mountain. It was an absolute. It was painting.
Painting is a visceral experience, one loaded with subtle information. Only Cezanne could get away with a system.
Like commercial stuff is sort of cheap and disposable and fun and can be sort of interesting in many ways. I love being in popular culture and existing in the evolution of popular culture. But it's so different from painting, and it's so different from that sort of slow, contemplative, gradual process that painting is.
The paradox in the evolution of French painting from Courbet to Cezanne is how it was brought to the verge of abstraction in and by its very effort to transcribe visual appearance with ever greater fidelity.
Cezanne had an enormous influence on everyone in that period; there was a change in attitudes to art. People found him disturbing because they didn't like their existing ideas being challenged and overturned. Cezanne was probably the key figure in my lifetime.
Just the way you might look at a painting and see the painting, and the painting is outside you, so this immaterial intellect would see the forms and behold them, as if they were standing before it. And Plotinus said that that can't be right because it falls prey to sceptical objections.
Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see. I don't know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint? It might be things, thoughts, a memory, sensations, which have nothing to do directly with painting itself. They can come from anything and anywhere.
The painter I really thought I could learn from was Cezanne - some sort of resemblance to oranges and greens and browns of the dry season in St. Lucia.
God is God and I am not. I can only see a part of the picture He's painting.
When I look at a painting it isn't only the painting I see but the thing that I am. If there is more in the painting that I am, then I won't see it.
I am definitely questioning the atonement and trying to discover how we can see it in a different way. We've got this image of God who needs some sort of flesh, some sort of blood, that needs some sort of vengeance to pay for sin. My experience of a loving God who's asked me to love my enemies - this isn't a God that demands something before you are accepted. I think Jesus died because Jesus was inclusive. God is inclusive. I think that the idea of God somehow being separated from us was more man's idea.
I hope to actually get back to painting someday... soon. I sort of transitioned into cartooning from painting.
All I care about these days is painting — photography has never been more than a way into painting, a sort of instant drawing.
It's sort of like my past is an unfinished painting, and as the artist of that painting, I must fill in all the ugly holes and make it beautiful again.
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