Art of Seeing

Art of Seeing

A reflection from A Month of Sundays.

Tall trees surround our house, spaced across the hilly lawn like stately privacies. Their sleek, strong trunks reach beyond the roof before they ramify into clusters of branch and leaf—earthbound, rooted clouds that nonetheless depend upon the sky. To sit beneath them and look up, as I did lazily yesterday afternoon, is to observe a natural ordering of color (the gray-brown bark, the green foliage, the blue desire of the sky) and element (wood, leaf, light) that delights both soul and sense.

Contemplating these trees always makes me think of the paintings of Paul Cézanne, because, some years ago, looking at his canvasses in a magnificent retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, taught me something about how to pay attention to them, and other things as well. Rocks and trees, apples and onions, mountains and houses—the subjects of the artist’s vision hung on the gallery walls like objects discovering perception in the very substance of their color, shape, and materiality. The world was revealed in a riot of looking, and one walked watchfully, as if through a building site in which apprehension itself was under construction.

Cézanne’s trees (“Large Pine and Red Earth,” for instance, shown here) in particular entranced my mind’s eye, and enhanced my moments of gazing reverie when I returned to the vistas around my house. To study Cézanne, I discovered then, is to reeducate our eyes to both the weight and wonder of the world, to refresh our vision—“as if,” the novelist William Maxwell put it in another context, “seeing were an art and the end that everything is working toward.”

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