Picasso Lecture

Picasso

Born in october 25th 1881 and died on 8th april 1973 around these dates the art movements where changing with modernism rising in from 1881 and drawing to a close in 1973. 

From a very young age Picasso had exceptional talent and skills in waiting and working with proportions that most people would strive all their life to achieve. It was said he was child prodigy and could already render paintings majestically. This early development of his talent is probably what pushed him to explore other methods of creating his paintings that differed from 'realistic' and simply copying what was infant of him, and what encouraged him to delve into a more creative expressive exploitation.

Picasso understood that there was something very powerful about a childs painting and that the reduced nature towards the thought process and creation of the painting made it self expressive without any shackles of pressure or embarrassment or stress of time and organisation of daily duties that adults tend to face, meaning their paintings resemble qualities of a free spirit and care free nature expressing what they will. 

Picasso understood that there are more ways of perceiving things rather than just what we see directly around us and how we relate to the world and what we feel and even what we simply know to be, is not always easily involved in painting direct subject matter. Picasso play instinct also meant that he didn't have set out comes and toyed with breaking boundaries and finding new ways to display his perspective of the world. This is what lead him to his cubism stage. Picasso recognised that with our eyes we see things in one fixed place at one given moment. However the world is 3d Yet even at this point in time what we cannot see things we still know about them and our memory and imagination fills in the gaps for us. For example from a certain angle looking at a person we can only see one side of their face and one eye, yet we are still aware of the other eye, he tried to unravel the 3D world onto a 2D page by playing with profile angles and including what we know and what we can see and what we can sense all on one page an to display a certain subject matter. the essence of what we know. this is why some of his paintings of portraits look distorted like in this painting for example:

Marie Therese Walyer 1937:

This painting is profile yet also from the side. It shows the eyes expressing different emotions and overall does not look like how Marie will have looked. However it does perhaps show a deeper story about her displaying her as how she is sense/ felt or interpreted by Picasso. His sense of awareness of angles of her face and body and awareness of mood and emotions. as her skin is blue and there is a sad eye that should be hidden or the unseen eye with regards to where it is placed and the angle we are looking at her from (we should not be able to see that eye from this angle) suggest a hidden sadness about her perhaps and the lines of her face could even suggest entrapment.

This painting points back again to Picasso's interest in children paintings and the idea of trying to "draw like as a child". As adults people are bound by rules and laws as we know of the world we live in. A child has imagination that has no limits, regardless of the physics and nature of the world. And so they are painting with a much more direct conduct between what the child thinks, and what they draw and how they draw it. for example if the child is sad, they will show a sad essence of style.

This idea of creating a painting with the essence of an emotion brings us onto the topic of pica's blue period. Picasso's blue period is where for a length of time he painted all of his paintings in blue. This was because we was very sad after the death of his good friend Casagemous. He painted his paintings with sad emotion and found that blue was the colour he was drawn to in his sadness. Before this blue was not necessarily associated with sadness. 

"I started painting in blue when i heard of casagemous's death" - Pablo Picasso

before this the colour blue was more associated with a royal nature, due to the Lapiz Lazuli, an expensive stone that was ground and used for its blue colour (the only way to get the colour blue at one time). After his work the colour blue became more associated with reflection and sombreness. And the genre of blues music came around with songs like the blue train in 1963. 

Picasso also used lots of symbolism in many of his pieces one painting in particular that shows lots of symbolism is Guernicia

This painting is riddled with symbolism. The painting is in response to the bombing of Guernica, a Basque country village in northern Spain by german and Italian warplanes at the hand of Spanish nationalist forces on 26th april 1937, during the Spanish civil war. The painting shows an arm holding a broken sword showing the lack of appropriate weaponry and how the weapons were no match for the bombs that hit the area. The bull in the image suggests the potential death of Spanish culture and destruction of Spanish lives. The suffering horse shows the suffering of innocents, horses in battle do not choose to go but this is used as a symbol and so refers to innocent people swell. The expression on the horse also symbolises agony and pain in suffering. The woman holding a baby also shows this idea of suffering as she holds a limp lifeless corpse. This also represents loss of care and nurture.