This is difficult. Cezanne's use of color was not what was unusual or unique about his paintings. He painted red apples, orange oranges...that's not really too wacky, if you ask me. If you want to write about Cezanne not painting exactly what he saw in front of him, then you need to talk about perspective first and then color. He tended to paint his still-lifes from all different angles on top of each other. He would begin to paint the fruit from the front and then maybe look at it from the left or right to continue the painting, so the perspective is sort of uneasy and none of the lines seem to relate to one another. Often his fruit seems like it's just about to all roll off the table, because the table is slanted and none of the lines are level- and you're looking at one piece of fruit from all different angles at once. Many times he painted the fruit on top of a cloth with the table exposed on either end and there is no way the edges of the table would logically match up with each other. Though all of this might seem like he was just a terrible painter, it created this amazingly intelligent sense of motion. That's pretty incredible, that a boring painting of a table full of fruit could look like it's about to move!
Now that you understand the perspective, this is where his color comes in. It can be said that he used bold patterns a lot, but in similar colors to the fruits for a background, often depicting wallpaper or a tablecloth. This kind of use of textile patterns was pretty unique to Cezanne- and some other painters in the same time period. The colors are really what anchors the composition of his paintings together, since your eye can't really rely on the perspective. He also used a very warm color palate. Like the glue keeping it all together so it doesn't fly away.
