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Paul Cezanne On The Banks Of A River Analysis

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The mesmerizing painting created by the 20th Century French artist Paul Cezanne portrays how even incomplete works are capable of depicting its own form of art and overall experience. His painting On the Banks of a River is constructed using oil on canvas and is an unfinished lifelike rendering of a natural scenery; well-preserved today at the RISD Museum. Cezanne’s process of painting and his techniques are clearly discernible in this early stage of art. Likely using a wide brush, his paint strokes are both purposeful and confident where his objective is to present only the most vital parts of the piece and each object’s location, creating an artwork made up of blocky, thick, and layered strokes similar to that of impasto paintings (a technique that layers large amounts of paint in order to form a larger picture). From close up it is challenging to distinguish the subject of the painting besides multicolored blotches of paint, but at a distance one can grasp the different shapes and colors merge to form a complete landscape. There are also three layers to this work, each diverse and together offers a sense of depth in the form of overlapping grounds and value contrasts. The foreground is the warmest, composed mainly of a sandy yellow color dotted with gray streaks possibly representative of stones or pavement, with some blue highlights to contrast the dirty yellow. The middle ground is the most detailed and consists of many dark colors and bright red and yellow geometric

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