"I could paint for a hundred years, a thousand years without stopping and I would still feel as though I knew nothing."
"The awareness of our own strength makes us modest."
~ Paul Cezanne 💎 #Botd 1839
Cézanne is said to have formed the bridge between late 19th-century Impressionism and the early 20th century's new line of artistic enquiry, Cubism... Both Matisse and Picasso are said to have remarked that Cézanne "is the father of us all".
In "Cézanne's Doubt",Merleau-Ponty discusses how Cézanne gave up classic artistic elements such as pictorial arrangements, single view perspectives, and outlines that enclosed color in an attempt to get a "lived perspective" by capturing all the complexities that an eye observes.
Ultimately, he [Cezanne] wanted to get to the point where "sight" was also "touch". He would take hours sometimes to put down a single stroke because each stroke needed to contain "the air, the light, the object, the composition, the character, the outline, and the style".
... A still life might have taken Cézanne one hundred working sessions while a portrait took him around one hundred and fifty sessions. Cèzanne believed that while he was painting, he was capturing a moment in time, that once passed, could not come back. ...