W@TW*: Channeling Picasso
I am fortunate to live in a city that has free art museums. On Sunday, my husband and I went to one of them for about an hour. The beauty of the museum being free is that you can visit frequently for a shorter amount of time. In the past, I would want to get my monies worth, stay for hours and "Od'd" on the art work.
Yesterday we participated in a short tour of the collection given by a volunteer. Because we were near on the calendar to St. Valentine's Day, the theme of the tour was love. We only looked at four exhibits, each representing love in a different way. The last stop on the tour was a painting by Pablo Picasso: his 1922 "Mere et enfant" or "Mother and Child". According to the docent, Picasso painted this after his cubism period, after his marriage, after fathering a child and after he had spent some time in Rome studying the masters. It was the return to a period of realism for him.
What is interesting is that the oil painting seems just like a sketch with watercolor highlights. The oil is so soft and light. He uses an economy of line but conveys a realistic portrait nonetheless. For such a giant in ushering us into the modern art era, Picasso demonstrates that he is his own man; he has his own way of going forward in art. He uses as inspiration his life circumstances or things around him and he incorporates it into his artwork. He doesn't get buttonholed into being a certain type of artist who paints a certain type of style. He is always growing, changing, and moving forward. He does so by allowing his ideas to expand and following where they lead.
As www.biography.com notes:
"Pablo Picasso remains renowned for endlessly reinventing himself, switching between styles so radically different that his life's work seems to be the product of five or six great artists rather than just one. Of his penchant for style diversity, Picasso insisted that his varied work was not indicative of radical shifts throughout his career, but, rather, of his dedication to objectively evaluating for each piece the form and technique best suited to achieve his desired effect. "Whenever I wanted to say something, I said it the way I believed I should," he explained. "Different themes inevitably require different methods of expression. This does not imply either evolution or progress; it is a matter of following the idea one wants to express and the way in which one wants to express it."
It inspires me to keep going forward in whatever the endeavor- to observe the world around me and to incorporate what I see and say it "the way I believed I should". Picasso reminds me to be confident and take chances.
What about you? Do you feel that you have grown and changed in your life? Personally? Professionally?
* W@TW= Wednesdays at the Well. Of course this week it is F@TW because I had difficulty this week getting this post out. More on that later. But for some reason writing F@TW seems like an expletive or some type of tweet.