Cezanne and Neuroscience

Paul keeps coming back into my thoughts and ideas about his process continue to unfold in the research about Senses of Tumour. I found this article revealing the neural dimension of value and form in Cezanne’s work:

In Cézanne The Neuro-artist – Form Over Colour, Cecilia Wong (2016) explains how the painter engaged in the unconscious (whilst also suggesting that the unconscious may not be so irrational as is often assumed), largely colourblind, black and white dimension, choosing form over colour:

So how was Cézanne a neuro-artist?

He found the ‘where and how’ neural pathway in our brain. He did so by holding the scene in his (and the viewer’s) peripheral vision —unconscious, mostly colour-blind, and does not discern details in bright light—so as to see a holistic and broad structure of 3-dimensional forms: the rocks, trees, and leaves which he painted using different light and dark shadings. Thus his mountain appears to rise up towards the viewer. This is very important. It refutes the Renaissance gold standard of painting: the perspective in which the mountain would recede from the viewer—a logic of the ‘what’ pathway—the conscious.

His art is slow to paint and slower to appreciate because it’s hard for us to stay in the unconscious—it makes us defenceless—as if entering meditation.

Luminosity and the ‘where and how’ pathway play a key role in Senses of Tumour, where the use of largely black and white medical imaging is employed, and the participant’s attention is fundamental to the process of the interaction and likely entering a meditative state. This feeds into the idea of Cezanne’s art being slow to paint and appreciate, requiring attention.

Infrared reflectogram detail of Avenue at Chantilly (NG 6525), National Gallery Technical Bulletin, Volume 29. 2008.

Perhaps this is ‘where and how’ the healing takes place?

Furthermore, Cézanne’s method of deconstructing his visual environment and refining it to a subjective, personal image is the general idea of Senses of Tumour: the individual re-forming the image of their tumour ‘environment’, subjectively by way of active participation in the creation of a new form.

For more information, read the blog post Cezanne and Neuroscience summarising the chapter about Cezanne in Proust was a Neuroscientist, by Jonah Lehrer.