The Painting Podcast Painting-Course.com

In this episode I interview Johnny Defeo and we discuss everything about painting the earth, our favorite artists, and I learn what Naples Yellow is good for.

In this episode of The Painting Podcast we look into the life and work of German artist Hannah Höch.

In this episode, which is the first in a series of the complete history of painting, we begin by asking the big questions. Why did we start painting in the first place? Who were the cave painters? And what did they think they were doing by smearing around paint on a wall?

Diving into the life, work, and ideas of Alrecht Altdorfer and thinking about how it relates to the 21st century. Special guest Brian Palecek

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Show Notes:
In this episode we’re going to be looking at the life and work of Paul Cezanne , a painter synonymous with his aloof character and plein air paintings of the landscape he lived in nearly his whole life. 
Pablo Picasso regarded Cézanne as a "mother hovering over," Henri Matisse would say he was "father to us all." Inevitably, our understanding of Cézanne's painting is colored by later cubism and abstraction, focusing attention on the formal aspects of his work. His reduction of the visible world into basic, underlying shapes, the faceted brushstrokes that seem to reconstruct nature through purely painterly forms, the fracture and flattening of space - all these can be seen as the beginnings of modern art. Yet Paul Cezanne saw himself stressed that he painted from nature and according to his sensations, seeking to realize a "harmony parallel to nature."
“It's not what the artist does that counts, but what he is. Cezanne would never have interested me a bit if he had lived and thought like Jacques-Emile Blanche, even if the apple he painted had been ten times as beautiful. What forces our attention is Cezanne's anxiety - that's Cezanne's lesson. ”
Cézanne's insistence on redoing nature according to a system of basic forms was important to Picasso's own interest at that time. 
Aches on Provence 
Big break in 1895 at an exhibition . 
He had been painting for 40 years with little public recognition. When his show opened he didn’t show up, he stayed back at the studio and continued to paint. Nowadays this may seem like some sort of a publicity stunt, but in Cezanne’s case we see someone who simply coudn’t stop painting. It’s a cliche at this point, but painting really is about a pursuit of the impossible. Time and time again we see that painters are on a quest of continuous improvement. One which is never fully satisfied.  
“It is only there that I have found true evidence of the life of our light. Present in its simplest form the austere and tender beauty of our Provence.”
One cannot look at Cezanne without thinking of Provence. He and his friends at the time were all quite familiar with the notion of “arcadia” and would read literature highlighting these themes. Arcadian presents us with a harmonious view of the world, where humans lie uncorrupted by civilization, but instead coexist with nature. This is in contrast to writers such as Thomas Moore who envisioned a Utopian civilization within it. An arcadian view represents what’s commonly called a “pastoral” view of the world. We can look at Cezanne’s landscapes and see this same type of harmony between him and the nature which he painted. 
His buddy Emil Zola moves to Paris and begins to write Cezanne back home. Telling him that he’d be able to draw from life for hours a day, and also copy master works in the Louvre. It’s kind of funny that his buddy, who had moved to Paris (to write about the beauty of nature ironically) had basically sent him a letter which outlined how he could work all day. 
Dad wanted him to go to Law school. And so he did. And Surprise! Cezanne absolutely hated it. Studying law must have been the furthest thing from roaming the countryside and painting the landscape. This became apparent that Cexanne would never be happy, so he left for Paris in 1861 after his father relented. Once in Paris he did some master copies and took some classes. He was extremely critical of himself. He started to run in the same circles as Manet and his buddies, who were all really bourgeois,  but Cezanne was a bit of a country bumpkin by comparison. 
By 1866 he was trying to get into the Salon, but he knew that it would be rejected. It was also a good form of self promotion to be refused. He would be the company of other impressionists who were also being rejected by the salon at the time. One can look to works by Bougareau which were being done at the same time for a comparison. In his work titled

Edward Hopper was a man of few words, however his paintings tell us a great deal about what was going on inside of his mind. In this episode we look at the life of Edward Hopper, his influences, some corollaries, and of course his paintings.