Picassoesque

On the shoulders of giants… let’s hope  🙂
We all need teachers and people that challenge and inspire us.

I have always been intrigued by the artwork of Picasso.  He shows what painting can be every time he picks up a brush.  He has been one of my most influencial teachers and the link to my understanding simplicity, graphic strength, and solid structure.

Here are ‘Abraham’ works that have been kick-started by the genius of Picasso.

This painting was created as a homage to my favourite art professor Tom Lapierre for pushing me to know the masters.

“One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.”
– Carl Jung

The ‘Observer’ was painted in 1999.  It was pre-Y2K and I was thinking about how we were moving out of a century of atrocities (the world wars; nuclear bombs; ongoing human strife and turmoil) and into the new millennium.  I grew up at the tail end of being a boomer and was influenced by pop culture from the late sixties to the mid-eighties.  Songs referencing the dawning of “the Age of Aquarius” and hopeful ditties where “The Age of Aquarius is causing great turmoil in order to make room for the new values of love, brotherhood, unity, and integrity”, hopefully blathering to get through the shit of the times. However, systems and wackiness seem prevalent. I was 35, in 1999 when this was painted, and much more naive then than now as I’m reflecting on this (June 2020).

The walls or rooms in this painting refer to different ages, as walking through a museum makes one do. There is a nineteenth-century Camille Corot styled umber coloured still life on the left wall with a torturous and jabbing twentieth-century Picassoesque painting I made up, which is on display behind the self-portrait as the ever pondering artist. Through the doorway to the next gallery, a pregnant woman and a Darren Waterston type abstract promises new birth and some kind of ethereal mystical hope for a new age to come in the 21st century. Little did we know that the twenty-first century presents 9/11 and so many more atrocities to come… I still have hope that human connections through new mediums can move humanity forward, but some days can be a bummer. Here is a lyric from a 1967 song by the YoungBloods:

“Love is but a song to sing
Fear’s the way we die
You can make the mountains ring
Or make the angels cry
Though the bird is on the wing
And you may not know why

Come on people now
Smile on your brother
Everybody get together
Try to love one another
Right now.”

Pitcher with Dead Flowers

Modern Primitive, Modern Primitive, Bust of a Woman with an I-phone 4

‘Totem in the Chamber of the Gods’

The design of ‘Pinocchio Assault’ was influenced by Goya’s ‘The Third of May 1808’, and Picasso’s ‘Massacre in Korea’, where the painting is marked by a bifurcated composition, divided into two distinct parts.

It is said that the new battles are fought with information, disinformation, surveillance, diversion, novelty, inundation, denial, multiple messaging, and distilling confusion.

As a student attending the Ontario College of art, I used to visit the Art Gallery of Ontario every week or two to observe and study the art.  A small Picasso painting called ‘La Soupe’ always drew me in.  I loved the simplicity of the design and the purity of the message.  I wanted to take that simplicity and add messaging related to today’s sway and diversion. I like to think about what adults choose to paint. Do image-makers or anyone with a platform have a responsibility? The Picasso is an image portraying charity, so I think values such as faith, hope, charity, and calling out ‘bullshit’ are fine subjects to paint.
I also thought the background in this piece makes a nice stage backdrop, where the narrative changes a hundred years later but the background remains the same. It is here used as a setting for a morality play.  In the earlier piece we have soup being offered and in the later piece we have charitable lies.

The Fairytale Illusion …

an imagined unicorn

wanting to be esteemed in the lexicon

on a hero’s journey, best kicker on the team,

Or at a minimimum to get the skills and cover the bills

all sunshine and rainbows in a place where the price of a house costs more than a Picasso

The myth of picasso lingers in the brain

‘Boy with the Horse’ in the Metropolitan Museum so lovely

Picasso

thousands of covered sheets of white…

A success beyond success

covering one piece of white fabric at a time

Artifacts commodified to the point of megalithic currency commodified so that each upcoming painter is left sincerely wanting, wanting

to uphold the illusion of success

presenting the mythical unicorn

with desire to uphold the illusion

With a desire that has stretched the arms 

while trying to uphold the mythical unicorn

hands painted in clunky painterly picasso-esque

he too looked back and coveted all the culture before him

so that he too could make a brush look like it was sitting off the edge of a table. It can take everything one has to get there.

And in the end to ask the question “why?”

Man that man could paint!

– M.A. 2023 – from notes on paintings