Picassiana

 

 Some Picasso quotes:

• About children's work: When I was their age I could draw like them, but it has taken me a whole lifetime to learn how to draw like them.[This perhaps has to do with learning how to be more of a right-hemispheric person--if that is even possible. People who become this is usually the result of getting struck by lightning--like the orthopedic surgeon who became a pianist and composer and became known for The Lightning Sonata].
•  My paintings are never done. That would sentence them to premature death.
• We invented cubism. We had no intention of inventing cubism, but simply of expressing what was in us.
• Don't expect me to repeat myself. My past does not interest me anymore. Rather than recopy myself, I would prefer to recopy others. At least I would bring something new to them. I like discovery too much… What after all is a painter? He is a collector who wants to make a collection by doing the paintings he saw in others’ collections. That's how it starts, but then it becomes something else.”[This is how it works for young musicians as well, where you’re influenced by an instrument that you picked up that was at a friend’s house, albums they played, things you heard om the radio. I’m not sure how that works now because of the isolated nature of human interaction stove-piped through the internet and social media. There are of course playlists, but it’s not remotely the same].
•  A work of art must not be something that leaves a man unmoved, something he passes by with a casual glance. It has to make him react, feel strongly, start creating as well…He must be jerked out of his torpor. 
• You can only work against something. I make paintings that bite, are violent, [have] clanging symbols, explosions. A good painting should bristle with razor blades.
• All of my paintings are research. There is a logical sequence. That is why I number them. It's an experiment in time. I number and date them. Maybe one day someone will be grateful. [I have always had some kind of numbering system. It gives you a framework to work from because you’re always making the next one and assigning it the next number. Even if it wasn’t successful, it’s “of a piece”.]
• It's not sufficient to know an artist's work. It is necessary to know when he did them, why, under what circumstances. Someday there will undoubtedly be a science which will seek to learn about man through the study of creative man.
• A picture doesn't change. The first vision remains intact in spite of appearances.[I’m of two minds about this. They do in fact evolve and the provisional versions mean nothing, but can be re-worked later to resolve the original vision that got lost in the shuffle of the evolution.]
• Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy.