Today, we visited the high museum of art to view an impressionist painting exhibition featuring Paul Cezzane primarily and other impressionist painters. The reason I took to writing this blog is not Paul Cezzane , it is Chaim Soutine, a name I am hearing for the first time just like Paul Cezzane.
A section with five intimate portraits of every day subjects was very striking.
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A section with five intimate portraits of every day subjects was very striking.
Each of those individuals felt very authentic. While they do not represent people I have seen during my walk of like in the society that I have lived in , I could feel a closeness to them that I have felt with portraitures of common place people in malayalam movies of people I know. Powerful paintings
This portrait titled 'Portrait of a young woman' by 'Gustave Courbet , 1819 - 1877' struck me with the insight that what I see in front of me is work done almost one thousand two hundred years before now. The woman captured here had walked the earth one thousand two hundred years back and she had here sorrows , her pain, captured right there and if I am sensitive enough and if Courbet was masterful enough, then right now I am feeling her emotional turmoil as she felt one thousand two hundred years ago.
This is the portrait of Henry Pearlman, a business man who himself owns this painting as well as the entire exhibition that I just had the good fortune to experience. Again, he made enough money for himself and then started pursuing art, a consistent pattern repeated in time and place across human societies. What I did not understand though is why a place like the high museum of art needs to have lights that reflect off from these frames like that. I have had to suffer those lights earlier as well.
Paul Cezzane is a great painter as well. Just that by the time I got to understand him, the time was up. However, Soutine hardly left me any bandwidth to appreciate Cezzane. It is clear that Cezzane is a true artist as well who painfully and truthfully approaches his work. The depth of layers of colors in his paintings were the simple result of Cezzane allowing the first layer of his art to dry before he starts to pain the next layer and so on. That speaks of his commitment to getting his work done right. The depth of colors did speak to me as in these beautiful paintings below. Art is such a relief.











