Miscellaneous:

[RonPrice]

A week ago, on Sunday 16 March 2008(1), I watched a television program about the French artist Paul Cezanne(1839-1906). From his early forties until his death at age 66 Cezanne worked more and more in isolation and in privacy, a virtual recluse. This was the central aspect, among the many, of Cezanne’s life that interested me since that tendency toward increasing artistic isolation, drawing on the familiar in my work, the need for a place to be by myself came to characterize my life as my fifties advanced and turned, year by year, into my sixties. After more than forty years(1954-1994) of a high sociability quotient, working alone became more and more paramount in my daily life.–Ron Price with thanks to ABC TV, 16/3/’08: 4:00-5:00 p.m.

I, too, needed, that attention,
that concentration, exploration,
to capture the truth of perception,
understanding, belief, desire,
imagination’s design, the familiar,
yes, a recluse of sorts, isolation,
aloneness, although this social
religion I had been associated
with in belief’s realms for 55
years kept me in touch with the
artifical world of sociability,
its necessary reservedness,
stylization, democracy, talk
for the sake of talking with
its own laws, a changing of
subjects, a means to liveliness,
harmony and consciousness of
a common character in which
everyone can play the game,
the play-form, the collective,
its airy realm where life emerges
in the flux of the facile, the happy1
and as genuine a sense of hospitality
as a human being can find—muster.

1 With thanks to Georg Simmel, “On Sociability,” From notes made when teaching sociology at the Thornlie Campus, Swan Metropolitan College of Tafe in the 1990s.

Ron Price
22 March 2008