When I go to the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ric can always find me in front of a Picasso painting. I'm not drawn to all of his work... but much of his art draws me in and holds me. Eventually I walk away and have to come back. When Ric asks me if I'm ready to go, I rush back to take one more look. I don't even paint in the style of Picasso... yet I feel inspired by him. I can't explain it. I recently painted one of Picasso's "Violin" paintings for a Fabulous Fakes Exhibit at the Cynthia Bickey Art Gallery in Beckley. The preliminary sketch on the canvas was the most difficult drawing I had ever done. The sketching part of a painting is usually quite easy for me, but this was a challenge - all the angles had to come together just right to accurately portray his work. Needless to say, I immediately acquired a heightened awareness of his talent. I had so much fun painting "Violin." I chose to use watercolors... that was my medium... on watercolor canvas. I didn't at all feel it was necessary to use oils because Pablo Picasso did. At one point I looked at the page from which I was copying and thought "How am I going to get that color of blue?" Immediately, my eyes went to one blue on my palette and then another. I mixed them together and... viola!... there it was. I felt like Pablo was with me... having a bit of fun. If you think I'm crazy, that's okay. I rather enjoy craziness. I carry in my head some things Picasso has said... my favorite being, "If I knew what it was going to be before I started, then what would be the point?" I read something else the other day that he said... "When I paint I feel that all the artists of the past are behind me." So there! Picasso was with me! And I think I heard him whisper once... "Jeanne, you're doing a good job on this painting... but you're no Picasso!"
Other things Pablo Picasso said!
Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs.
Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
Bad artists copy. Good artists steal.
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.
Everyone wants to understand painting. Why is there no attempt to understand the song of the birds?
Everything you can imagine is real.
God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style, He just goes on trying other things.
He can who thinks he can, and he can't who thinks he can't. This is an inexorable, indisputable law.
I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.
I don't believe in accidents. There are only encounters in history. There are no accidents.
I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.
Inspiration exists, but it has to find us working.
Love is the greatest refreshment in life.
Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.
Painting is a blind man's profession. He paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen.
Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.
Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility.
The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web.
There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.
To draw you must close your eyes and sing.
To finish a work? To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul, to give it its final blow the coup de grace for the painter as well as for the picture.
What a sad fate for a painter who loves blondes, but who refrains from putting them in his picture because they don’t go with the basket of fruit! What misery for a painter who hates apples to be obliged to use them all the time because they go with the cloth! I put everything I love in my pictures. So much the worse for the things, they have only to arrange themselves with one another.
When I paint I feel that all the artists of the past are behind me.
When they tell me I'm too old to do something, I attempt it immediately.
Who sees the human face correctly: the photographer, the mirror, or the painter?
You have to have an idea of what you are going to do, but it should be a vague idea.
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| Jeanne's "Picasso's Violin" |
