Last night, having done no art during the day, I sketched out a couple of ‘via Picasso’ pencil drawings. Drawing inspiration from Josep Palau i Fabre’s third large volume on Pablo:
This is my most recently acquired in this suite of very large and very lovely tomes. And it’s the one I’m least familiar with, contents wise. So I thought I’d have a butcher’s…
I quite like to draw upon (boom boom!) almost any old image. I will select some and reject others. But often the ones I pick aren’t those I necessarily like the best. They just appear, to me, to have something I could learn from. Quite what, I’m not always sure.
As can be seen, from this and previous posts, I’m maximising the use of the sketch pad, by working both pages. I need to spay-fix the resulting artworks, to minimise them printing onto each other.
Sometimes I’ll just work on one. At others I might work on both. Mostly I’ll concentrate on one at a time. I’m still using mixed media. And I’m finding that enjoyable and satisfactory for what are, to me, preparatory or exploratory sketches.
For some reason, for me, Picasso, with his volcanic outpourings of creativity, is a go to seam of inspiration. I can mine in the many chambers of his creative catacombs, and never fear I’ll run out of exciting ideas.
I even find it intriguing that he might have certain popular recurrent themes – bull fighting, theatre and the commedia dell’arte all spring to mind – that I’m not that fussed about myself. I can still milk these strands for ideas.
I reproduce the current WIP, above (exactly as it is at the top of the post), again… so as to have it in view whilst reflecting on it. I’m reading it – in my version – as a figure with an inverted guitar in a brown room, against a door opening.
There are elements of symmetry, balance, or ‘echoes’, some drawn from Picasso’s work, and some that I’ve introduced myself. I can tell that I want to ‘abstractify’ the whole thing a lot more. And probably soften some of Picasso’s harder angles/planes.
Picasso likes things that double up – a bike seat and handle bars become a bull’s head, for example – and here a figures’ body is also that of a guitar. The Harlequin references – the diamond pattern and funny (admirals?) hat – are retained in my version. But I think I’ll work them into something less obvious.
Started working a bit more on the second piece.
Much to my surprise, I actually quite like where the second piece is headed. Once again, it’s a combination of Picasso, and my own stuff. Whilst mining Picasso, I do have to make these things my own.
I started using some cheap gouache paints, that I got from WHSmith, in Peterboro’. They turned out to be a bit more translucent/transparent than I had imagined they would be. But that’s not proving to be a problem, so far…