“Je n’ai, pour ma part, jamais évité l’influence des autres, j’aurais considéré cela comme une lâcheté et un manque de sincérité vis-à-vis de moi-même.”
“For my part I have never avoided the influence of others. I would have considered it cowardice and a lack of sincerity toward myself.” — Henri Matisse
I bought three apples at the Giant Food store (well, actually I bought five apples, but I ate two of them). These apples have already appeared in this blog in pictures (they were competing with the clementines, you might recall). After comparing apples and oranges, these apples are ready to go head to head with new competitors. They want to be famous. Here they are in their room with the picture of their idols on the wall.
They stand before Cezanne’s famous apples of Provence. I don’t know. It’s hard making the real apples that nature makes and Giant sells stand up strongly against the rich pigmentary apples of imagination that Cezanne conjured when he looked at the contents of his produce basket of rural France during the 19th century. Oh, how his old Provencal apples have such grandeur, such gravitas! Real light reflects off mine and gravity pulls them down yet they don’t quite stack up!
When doing a “picture within a picture” of this sort, calling on the Masters, one ought to be ambitious and vie with the Big Guys. So, I did. I tried to do that. I got Cezanne’s picture there (in the form of an advertisement for an exhibit at the Baltimore Museum) and I looked back and forth between it and my apples from Giant Food.
Okay, so it’s back to the drawing board for me. It’s hard to capture the full dignity and splendor of apples from life. Cezanne was so clever. But I tried! And I’ll try some more.
Here’s the same three guys by themselves.
Aletha Kuschan's Weblog 