Holding Hands with Cezanne While Wandering Memory Lane

Last Saturday, my sister, mom and her boyfriend and I all piled into the car and made our way into the city to visit the Philadelphia Museum of Art. My mom is a painter by nature and LOVES Cezanne, so my sister bought her the tickets as a birthday present.
I tagged along, and spent most of my time making sotto voice comments to my sister about composition, color and paint application. As much as I despise small crowded areas, I actually found my self surprised at how much I enjoyed the exhibit. When I studied painting in college, I had this one professor who also regularly expressed his devout admiration for the works of Cezanne, and I have to say I never really got it. I always thought his work was bland, and with my love of brilliant pop art I suppose that is not surprising. Maybe the difference was seeing it in person as opposed to a picture in a book, but I could fully appreciate his planar brush strokes and attention to the minutest color detail and how well his pictures were composed, even bending trees to his designer's whim. And I loved seeing exactly how old these pictures are-again, something you just cannot appreciate from a book. I had to keep arms crossed sometimes so I wouldn't be tempted to reach out and experience the tactile joy of all the textures from the layers upon layers of paint. I hate to say it, but it actually made me want to paint again, and I haven't picked up a brush since I graduated from college some five (ahem!) years ago. That actually has something to do with same said painting professor haranguing me to with in an inch of my sanity....