My last semester in college, studying 19th century avant garde art (probably one of the most amazing courses I've taken, thanks to the wonderful grad student instructor), I came across the painting, Forest Interior, by Cezanne.

For my final paper, I spent a lot of time at the Legion of Honor, sitting on an uncomfortable wooden bench in the final room of the modernist gallery wing, staring at a canvas framed by a ornately bulbous gold frame. Why was this thing so important? What made it special? What are the facts I know about modern art. Where does this fit? Is it abstract? Representational? Both? I thought, well, lets stick to the what exists. In English, the only reading is the textual reading, so what's really here? 

Well, Here is this crowded landscape with some trees and sky. But this landscape is different than other landscapes. There's no road. No horizon. Ok, maybe this isn't a landscape. This brown tree in the right field is awkward. The tree is slightly drunken and a frazzled halo of greenery hovers over the trees behind it. The drunken tree, with its heavy darkened outline, is a lone dissenter amidst the straight trunks around it. Maybe, this landscape is actually a painting of an object - the tree, the subject.

But the tree is perched impossibly atop a boulder, unsteady, like it's in the process of falling down or flying away. The boulder on second glance, doesn't look too safe either, its shear surface slides into the intimated precipice below. The other rocks to the left seems solid enough, rounded and inviting, and so I try go there. But in the compressed space at the bottom of the frame, where the dirt seems relatively flat, I feel crowded. So I try to move out of the foreground and into the painting, but the boulders get more solid. They impede me and I can't seem to find a way beyond them. 

So I cling to the normalcy of the straight trees, the ones that run reliably up and down, the ones that are logically situated by the gravity of the Earth. But actually, all these trees are kind of strange too. The ones in the front are lit, yet the ones in the background seem lit too, defying the rules of perspective. The shadows in between the trees don't seem to be relating to the logical physics of sunlight.

The depth of field in the world has suddenly shifted on me. Now the trees seem to come from a different painting altogether, or more like different paintings plural, superimposed onto one plane. Choosing to focus on different left and right hand trees begins to frame the landscape into smaller slices, re-configuring the painting into smaller paintings. Things start to make sense inside these divisions. But that drunken tree is there again, refusing too recede, disrupting the equilibrium. My eye runs up the trunk of the tree, past its shifty, transparent evergreen and into the pale, featureless sky, a brief respite for the claustrophobia of the forest. But the sky is so far away and is squeezed on all four sides by barriers.

I'm distracted by pops of color, disconcerting blobs of orange-red nestled in the branches of adjacent trees, and my eye returns into the canopy of the forest. And once again, I'm pondering the trees, the queerly shaded branches angling down acutely, pointing back down to the boulders tumbling into the earth where patches of the shadow lay side by side with an impossibly lit rock, situated next a dab of paint that doesn't seem to denote grass or dirt or anything real, as if those dabs are just paint and the agency of the painter and painted surface are struggling to speak through the artifice of the art. Realism and abstraction seem to be having a tiff, not quite a battle but a dialogue on the paradox of representation having more than one meaning and purpose.

Again, I survey the shallow field of dirt at the bottom of the frame and mentally climb the barricade of rocks leading me back into the nowhere in the trees. I try to find a way out my conundrum. I re-confront the out-of-place tree. I search for safe passage through all the byways that appeared closed to me before - a path blocked by walls of shadow, another path by blocked by forbidding branches, a path through the boulders that seems to lead into a clearing but becomes a dead end, an opening towards the sky presses down again to the earth, the earth tilting down into precipice.

Repeat. 

I sit there, trying to make sense of this painting, thinking intellectually about the my notes in lecture, art theory, factual history, revisiting Cezanne's biography in my mind. With reservation, I posit that only I experience what I can experience; whether that is a personal interpretation of being in a forest - out at the end of a trail on my bike - or what I think I know about art, or what I think I know about what I think. I sit there going through the circular motion of these ruminations.

Suddenly, it occurs to me that this frustration I'm feeling was also felt by someone who had an interest in sharing that emotion with me: That the formal concepts I spent months preparing to understand, my experiences thus far, are coalescing into a feedback loop. That I am being led through a metaphorical forest with a trail of breadcrumbs showing me how to "see" - when my gaze affects what is happening, what images are connected and where, how I direct those observations. That by walking through the forest, I am engaging in a process of contemplation and release that will ultimately transform what I feel and believe. That maybe what I am actually traversing - while traversing the image of a supposed landscape - is the landscape in my mind.

Telling someone they are "seeing the forest for the trees" and that "when one door closes, another door opens" is a bit like that old cliche of describing the colors of a sunset to someone who is blind.  The lesson plan that Cezanne prepared, intentionally or unintentionally, both literally and figuratively, mentored me through the process of gaining - and reminds me to keep looking for - that kind of perspective. 

There is a way out of this claustrophobic painting, hidden behind the signpost of the drunken, misguided tree. Cezanne obscured a house back there, a sketch revealed only through forensic examination and dissection of preparatory drawings. Yet, even if you don't know that house is there - observing the image, overcoming that initial object fixation, and exploring the in-between - can lead to the same liberating conclusion that a passage exists.