Here we have a double square and a half! A symphony of autunm colours taken here in Bergby on that path that runs past the electric house and over by. We began with the singularity in tow a good week ago now but have been unable to finish it as our duties in the city have kept us away. It tends to be only possible to paint here at home on the weekends now worse luck. If it were up to us we would never leave the area and indeed we might even revert to Torpoint rules1 but that is not possible at present and in fact would only become possible if we either became a kept painter or were signed off as a burn out case.
We have taken a few little stints here and there and now it is done and here you see it.
What of it?
We carry on with the Cezanne way, managing to keep the sheer gall of the attempt at the back of our mind, and have made some progress it seems. The main thrust of the picture is a sweep of yellow orange moving across the canvas from left to right. The ground is low and patched in with square-like violet shapes leading down to the sparse but lively flat of the cut field. The sky is a thin blue left rough. A path leads up the bank on the left side. We had to stop as we began to reach 'too high' when rendering the sweeping leaves; how quickly it falls away and how true that paragraph of the old lizard is.2 We are beginning to understand what he may be getting at with all that talk of the tension in the picture and of the tension not escaping, of the canvas being tight and true, of the errant hand closing and especially the remarkably contemporary issue of not letting some theory sway us. That said the more we might understand these ideas the more we appreciate the difficulty of carrying them out. We get so far then it begins to slip.
Of course when all that was evolving it was an avant garde business or at least the forefront of painting. It is worth remembering however that for all the avant gardeness of the painters back then there was always the far more radical activities of throngs of fumistes titting around the Paris cafe scene mocking scathingly the pretension to make art at all. Or so it seems from Smith and Naifeh's Paris chapter and I quite believe it.3
What of plein air painting after the efforts of our Dutchman and the two Pauls?4 In the established vision of modernism not a lot. Nothing. The great influence of each was applied in works which embraced the imaginary, which embraced effects of the paint, and which paid little regard to direct observation; essentially in studio work. For all the diversity of modernist works stemming from messrs Gauguin, Van Gogh and Cezanne can we say that it is nature itself that is left by the wayside.
A handshake,
John
1. The Torpoint Art Service required that residents worked strictly within a 1 mile radius of the town center.
2. Refers to Cezanne. See Work 29, note 5.
3. Refers to Van Gogh: The Life by Steven Naifeh, Gregory White Smith
4. The other Paul must be Gauguin.