A 1975 entry from Anne Truitt’s “Daybook: The Journal of an Artist”:

For years and years I was baffled by Cézanne’s work. I grasped his principles and pored over the way he constructed his paintings and thought and thought about what he must have experienced to be able to put color down so that it expressed formal values in accord with his vision. But nothing did any good. I remained baffled. The paintings would swim into focus and then out before I could catch them whole. Until one afternoon at Long Lake in Michigan when, walking with Sam toddling along beside me In his little red-and-white seersucker shorts and red T-shirt, I glanced off to my right and saw a Cézanne—exactly as he would have painted it—in a curve of woods.

Stephen Schenkenberg @schenkenberg