R&D - The thought of Picasso's Blue period.

Yesterday, unfortunately I had to attend the funeral of the mother of a dear friend of mine, who herself, was a dear friend too. I was reminded of a poem that was given to me when my own mother passed away some 20 years ago, which starts with the line "death is nothing at all… I have only slipped away into the next room. I am I, and you are you…" A poem by the Canon of St Paul's Cathedral, Henry Scott Holland (1847 -1918).

Whilst death is the extreme form of loss, a death is in a way, the most vivid kind of something left behind. It is our memories of sweet times spent together, which we yearn for, that some "things left behind" we want to acquire back again. This idea of the fading memory, of something that we cannot see clearly, but we know is still there, creates an almost obsessive image in our minds.

The paintings that I want to create need to hold this idea of a fading image and my experiments over the last week are beginning to take a more detached dimensional which is precisely what I want to try and achieve.

This new dimensional, this something left behind, which can't quite be seen but imagined is the essence of what I want to try and represent. I just simply need to keep practising through the use of different mediums and keep building that fourth dimensional which is neither touchable nor exists, but it is there! It is in our imagination, just like the displacement that I was talking and thinking about yesterday.

I was reading about Pablo Picasso recently, and the fact that for much of his early training, Picasso was rather unsuccessful, simply because he was an impersonator many different types of styles, simply looking for his own unique voice. This is very much like almost all artists, that by copying and emulating other more experienced masters of the craft, they themselves learn techniques necessary to carry forward and develop their own unique signature. A classic line that was quoted was that by Isaac Newton which is "if I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
(Reference, Gompertz, W, (2015), Think like an Artist, Penguin Books / Random House, London).

Breakthroughs come by building on existing things and making very small adjustments. Sometimes I lose my own way, but I realise the importance is to just keep going and make small adjustments. Quite often the catalyst for bigger changes are a result of an extreme emotional charge. In Picasso's case, it was the traumatic death by suicide of Carlos Casagemas, is old friend and peer that had taught Picasso much about life in his early adult world.

The depression that Picasso was thrown into, actually caused and spawned an independent creative feeling that Picasso had not expressed in his art by copying others before. This new inspiration and surge of productive work was labelled his "blue period". Within it Picasso started to produce an independent and unique representation of the things that he saw around him, by combining ideas that he had been acquiring through the study of all those great masters, and then in his own words "I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else".
(Reference, Gompertz, W, (2015), Think like an Artist, p85-95, Penguin Books / Random House, London).