Still Life in Watercolors

Detail 11
splatters, and subtle faux pas, veil upon
veil of color gathers—emerald green, ocher
orange, sunflower yellow, red turning to
wine, and Prussian blue—all hedged in and
.held at bay by a boundary, reinforced repeatedly,
of the same blue.
It is underneath that blue boundary—
that blue-upon-blue demarcation between
the linen's tabula rasa and the tapestry's
bright, complicated films of color—that
we begin to sense the presence of the very
first steps of the drawing, the roughing in
of the composition in the loosest of looping
graphite lines. Upon closer inspection, and
then technology-aided examination, we find
pencil lines swirling in a scribble—sometimes
continuous, sometimes broken—that
meanders from apple to apple to white pot
to milk pitcher to folds in the linen and then
partial edges, and finally to the fragmentary
contours of the tapestry on the right, and in
Detail 12
106
CEZANNE IN THE STUDIO