Jason Fanning museum visit

I visited the Kimbell Art Museum and found Paul Cézanne’s 1895 work, Maison Maria with a View of Château Noir. The piece itself is an oil on canvas painting measuring 65cm by 81cm. Cézanne employs short, emphatic brushstrokes in order to convey a sense of immediacy with his work. The various sections of the painting – the building, road, landscape, and sky, all are consistent in direction of strokes amongst themselves, but are often opposed to the areas around them. The strokes utilized to paint the sky begin at the upper left and descend to the bottom right, while those of the lane begin at the bottom left and jut upward to the right. This separates the painting much more distinctly when viewed closely, giving a strangely disorienting sensation of viewing the scene through a bird’s eyes while it swoops over the lane on an apparent path up and over the building in the center. On the outskirts of the piece, more and more blank splotches of canvas appear, sending the eye to the center of the canvas. The swirling effect of these opposed brush strokes lends the painting a slightly hazy, surreal effect, as if the world is slightly tilted to the left.
The hues are shifted into a much more vibrant palette than in real life, giving the scene a vivid intensity. The sky, building, and presumably the lane are all fairly realistic – though excessively vibrant – in color, while the trees are made of a series of red, blue, and violet brush strokes, some of which appear to have been made by a palette knife. The lines of the painting tend to be fairly linear and bring the eye’s focus to the building. In seeing the painting up close, however, the building seems to be an afterthought of sorts, as the landscape, particular the grasses at the right and the area around the rocky patch just in front of the building appear to have demanded most of Cézanne’s attention.
The rhythmic sense generated by the curving opposition of color and brushstrokes creates a sense of movement and life, as mentioned earlier with the example of the flying bird’s eye view. I felt a slight sense of vertigo myself the more I stared at the painting, a bit similar to the sensation of the helicopter flight intro at the Omni theater. The lighting is generated by the darkness along the left edge of the house and by the darker, inner patches of grass at the right of the painting, leading me to believe the sun would be over the viewer’s right shoulder. There is a definite sense of two-dimensionality in the upper right corner of the painting, where the mountain seems to be unrealistically close to the viewer while simultaneously sharing the same hues as the sky, making one believe that it should be much further in the distance. The painting itself is fairly balanced, lending equal parts to the sky, man-made structures, and the natural landscape of the foreground. The texture of the sky seemed to be of the most interest, as many of the impasto strokes simulated the fluffy texture of the clouds.