RonPrice

A week ago, on Sunday 16 March 2008,1 I watched a television program about the French artist Paul Cezanne(1839-1906). From Cezanne’s early forties until his death at age 66 what some call “this father of all modern art” worked more and more in isolation and in privacy, a virtual recluse. This was the central aspect, among many, of Cezanne’s life that interested me since that tendency toward increasing artistic isolation, drawing on the familiar in my work, doggedly struggling to deal with complexity, 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 1ABC 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, imagination’s design,
belief, desire, the familiar, complexity.

I, too, was a recluse of sorts with my own
isolation and aloneness, although a social
religion kept me in touch with an immense
artifical world of sociability, of a necessary
and essential reservedness, stylization, talk,
democracy, for the sake of talking with its
own laws, a changing of subjects, some play
of relations, joining and loosening, winning
and succumbling, giving and taking, means
to liveliness, a solemn consciousness and
harmony where everyone can play the game
and the giver becomes invisible behind some
kind of play-form, some collective, some airy
realm where life emerges in the flux of the
facile and happy, producers lose themselves
in their products, where a certain tragic vision
encompasses the weak and the strong and feeds
on a deep and loyal relation to aesthetic charms
which embody the finest and subtlest dynamics
of broad and rich social existence, not negative
conventionalism merely, but a type of liberation
and relief where the latent forces of reality
reverberate dimly and their gravity evaporates,
or so one would hope, into a mere attractiveness.

Ron Price
22 March 2008
(updated for Poetry in Colour
Forum on: 15/7/08)