Still Life in Watercolors

Detail 16
scansion and up-close inspection of different
ways of working, snarled and reinforced
at the center, diaphanously veiled at the outskirts.
We shall begin with the latter, and
move back in through the forest of tapestried
taches, or patches, at the boundary of the
central arrangement of objects, and in from
there to the composition's node, the blue pot
that is both starting and culminating point,
that is layered with invisible graphite and
gradations of blue running from thin to thick,
translucent to opaque, from watery binder
to richly pigmented mineral deposit, the
two constitutive elements of the watercolor
medium.
In the watercolor's northern suburbs
we find the shallowest, most diluted of
its districts, the band of translucent brown
and green above the line of the uppermost
course of the wainscoting (detail 16). There
Cezanne's unusual manner of working
in watercolor—laying down a patch of thin,
relatively unmixed color, allowing it to dry,
and then layering over it other patches, often
stroked in different directions, of other colors,
similarly thin, and similarly pure—can be
parsed by the eye with relative ease. Because
of the openness of this strip, its aeration by
bare white paper, and its lack of concentrated
pigment or dense complication, it is easier
to see through one layer to the next, from the
palest of rose to a wash of blue to a slightly,
but only slightly, denser accumulation of dun
green, not necessarily in that order. (It is a
pool of the same dun green that seems to
have escaped its bounds to lie stranded at the
bottom left edge of the white linen, perhaps
initially in an effort to balance the pale green
with the brilliantly multicolored with the bare
white areas of the composition.) Also available
to the eye here as nowhere else in the
still life is the characteristic watercolor
"handwriting" of Cezanne, the way he feathered
the watery pigment out from its original
pool in thinner, fingerlike strokes that simulate
the hatch marks of his drawing (not
to mention the diagonally laid "constructive
strokes" of his oil painting) while amor-
evoking the very hand and even the
phously
brush (es) with which he worked (detail ij).
In the ribbon that divides the upper
region of wall from the lower (this skyline is
the largest threshold on the sheet of paper,
a kind of frame within a frame), we can see
the complementary way in which Cezanne
worked with macroboundaries and large
Overleaf: detail 17
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PENCIL LINES AND WATERCOLORS