Two of Allen’s early heroes share a birthday today – Edgar Allan Poe and Paul Cezanne
“Everything leads to Poe”, he famously stated. “You can trace all literary art to Poe’s influence: Burroughs, Baudelaire, Genet, Dylan…It all leads back to Poe”
(and for timeliness, we draw your attention to this posting)
and Cezanne? – Check out Allen on “Cosmic Vibrations in Cezanne” – and here (on Cezanne’s methodology)
“So Cezannne attempted to “reconstitute my little sensation of space” (to reconstitute his petite sensation of space) by painting a canvas without use of perspective lines, as the ancients had used, (that is, without narrowing the railroad tracks to the center in order to indicate distance, without using that kind of perspective lines), he tried to give you the appearance of space by cross-hatching a lot, advancing color and putting next to it a cold receding color, and putting next to that a hot advancing color, and then a cold receding color till his whole canvas was a cross-hatch of deliberately designed cubes, triangles, squares and spheres that optically would appear to recede in space. In other words, to create the space of the canvas, not by perspective lines but by the use of hot colors advancing and cold colors receding. And to create an inter-relating network of forms that would lead the eye optically inward in a canvas and give you the appearance of space.”