The Mystery of Picasso

The Mystery of Picasso

The strokes, the marks, the black, the white, and of course the colorsÐ'--amazing! Pablo Picasso was a true genius in his artwork. I have always thought of Picasso as a great canvas painter, but in this video he proved and exceeded my expectations in being able to work with anything and everything on a very tight schedule set by the camera man. Art should not have such strict settings, especially when they are placed on an artist of Picasso's stature.

In The Mystery of Picasso, audiences saw a dozen paintings take shape, stroke by stroke, from blank canvases to finished pieces of art. Watching Picasso's process was enlightening. He always started simply. He drew a cartoon sketch or geometric intersecting lines, in plain black, on the white canvas. On some of the simpler pieces, he simply added several layers of color and a few layers of texture.

On the more serious paintings he evolved his and forms, painting over the original, adding color, shadowing to add depth, or even changing the form itself by painting over a part of it. One some of his geometric black and white paintings, he blacked out areas that are too complex, even though they have already been developed into forms or shapes. So often, the former complexity is only hinted at by what remains on the canvas.

My favorite example of Picasso's more intricate pieces from the film is a painting of a goat. This goat has a flat neck for half of its lifetime, but after altering things around it, Picasso decided to paint a curve in its neck to match the two curving horns on top.

At one point in the movie, the director even ran the footage of Picasso's creating backwards. This was awesome because although I had been watching all these paintings evolve; it really proved to remind me just how Picasso's paintings did change over time. Running the film backwards was a way of deconstructing Picasso's painting to see what went into it.