Studying Cezanne on “random day”

This morning with coffee making random drawings, I was opening books, drawing whatever caught my eye.  The drawing above is  after Cezanne’s Blue Vase (Musee d’Orsay).  Never noticed the distortion in the vase in quite the same way before making this drawing.  The vase has a scalloped rim, but only on one side.  The shape is distorted too — everything is distorted.  And yet I seemed to see the why of the distortion more clearly today.

I was supposed to be studying landscape.  Indeed I picked up the Cezanne book to look at landscapes when I was derailed by this still life.  The vase and huge bough of flowers is tree-like and so it satisfies some of what I sought.

But today was also random day.  See things and make pictures.  Grab tools and think with them.  Crayons, blue ball point pen, paint, whatever.

Behind things

Outdoors behind the house, behind the garden in autumn, the vegetables now gone and the land going fallow, I drew the view of the shaded house against the glare of a brilliant blue day.  Much of my past is tied up there in that house, amid these shadows.  There are too many millions of things to see.  Thousands of stalks of plants, glints of light, millions of leaves, a thick gauze veil of apertures through which bits of light peek through.

And every aperture, a facet of a kaleidoscopic mirage.