Picasso
When Pablo Picasso was 85, he was asked how his later paintings could be so innovative – could have the boldness and fire of a young artist’s work, he replied, “It takes a long time to become young,”
In this short file, I collected the words of Picasso mainly from the book, “Picasso in his words” and from the net. The book comes with many of his paintings. His words are full of Zen. They are often like a breeze of fresh air or perhaps his life’s energy springing out. So, here are some of his words that resonated in me. Categorization was by me and out of my curiosity.
Here is an additional web site:
http://www.tamu.edu/mocl/picasso/splash.html
Take care, good day, good life!!! - Kio Suzaki (1/03/03)
Mission
“Whatever the source of the emotion that drives me to create, I want to give it a form which has some connection with the visible world, even if it is only wage war on that world.”
“Painting isn’t an aesthetic operation; it’s a form of magic designed as a mediator between this strange, hostile world and us, a way of seizing the power by giving form to our terrors as well as our desires. When I came to that realization, I knew I had found the way.”
“When you have something to say, to express, any form of submission becomes unbearable in the long run. You have to have the courage of your vocation and the courage to live by that vocation. The “second profession” is a trap! I was often penniless myself, but I always resisted any temptation to live by any means other than my painting.”
“Repeatedly I am asked to explain how my painting evolved. To me there is no past or future in art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present it must not be considered at all.”
“Painting is stronger than I am. It makes me do what it wants.”
“People don’t realize what they have when they own a picture by me. Each picture is a phial with my blood. That is what gone into it.”
Values/ Passion
“Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird?”
“If things I really love – water, the sun, love – could be bought, I’d have been ruined long ago.”
“So then, my dear sir, you are among those who appreciate laurel leaves better in a stew than on a crown?”
“I have always believed, and still believe, that artists who live and work with spiritual values cannot and should not remain indifferent to a conflict in which the highest value of humanity and civilization are at stake.”
“How can you expect an onlooker to live a picture of mine as I lived it?.... How can anyone enter into my dreams, my instincts, my desires, my thoughts, which have taken a long time to mature, and to come out into the daylight, and above all grasp from them what I have been about – perhaps against my own will?”
“What is beauty anyway? There is no such thing. I never appreciate, any more than I like. I love or I hate.”
“Max Jacob once asked me why I was so nice to people who did not really matter and so hard on my friends. I told him I did not care about the first group, but since I cared very much about my friends, it seemed to me I ought to put our friendship to the test every once in a while, just to make sure it was as strong as it needed to be.”
Art/ Liberation/ Paradox
"Every child is an artist. The problem is, how to remain an artist once he grows up."
“What is painting? Everyone clings to old-fashioned ideas and outworn definitions, as if it were not precisely the role of the artist to provide new meaning.”
“Freedom is something you have to be very careful about. Whatever you do you find in chains. The freedom not to do something means that you’re absolutely bound to something else. And there are your chains.”
“What I like is to be able to live like a poor man with plenty of money.”
“Anything new, anything worth doing, can’t be recognized.”
“In art intentions are not sufficient and, as we say in Spanish: love must be proved by facts and not by reasons. What one does is what counts and not what one had the intention of doing.”
“Braque always said that in painting only intention counts. And it’s true. It’s what you want to do that counts, not what you do. That’s what’s important.”
“Forcing yourself to use restricted means is the sort of restraint that liberates invention. It obliges you to make a kind of progress that you can’t even imagine in advance.”
"When I was a child I wanted to draw like an adult, now that I am an adult I want to draw like a child."
"Work like nature, not after her."
Creative Process/ Intuition
“When you begin a picture, you often make some pretty discoveries. You must be on guard against these. Destroy the thing, do it over several times. In each destroying of a beautiful discovery, the artist does not really suppress it, but rather transform it, makes it more substantial.”
“I’m always saying to myself; “That’s not right yet. You can do better.” It’s rare when I can prevent myself from taking a thing up again…. X number of times, the same thing. Sometimes, it becomes an absolute obsession. But for that matter, why would anyone work, if not for that? …. To me, it means; from one canvas to the next, always go further…”
“A picture is not thought out and settled beforehand. While it is being done it changes as one’s thought changes. And when it is finished, it still go on changing, according to the state of mind of whoever is looking at it….. This is natural enough, as picture lives only through the man who is looking at it.”
“Have you ever seen a finished picture? … To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish It means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid of its soul, to give it its final blow: the most unfortunate one for the painter as well as for the picture.”
“I never calculate. That is why the other who do, calculate so much less accurately than I do.”
“I do not seek. I find.”
“What counts is the drama of that plastic act, the moment at which the universe comes out of itself and meet its own destruction.”
“I love what belongs to me, yet at the same time I have a strong urge to destroy. It’s the same with love.”
“No, painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.”
“You can try anything in painting. You even have a right to. Provided you never do it again.”
Truth/ Delusion
“We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least truth that is given us to understand. Artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies. If he only shows in his work that he has searched, and re-searched, for the way to put over lies, he would never accomplish anything.”
“Drawing is no joke. There is something very serious and mysterious about the fact that one can represent a living human being with line alone and create not only his likeness but, in addition, and image of how he really is. That is the marvel!”
“What counts is what is spontaneous, and impulsive. That is the truthful truth. What we impose upon ourselves does not emanate from ourselves.”
“A painter paints to unload himself of feelings and visions. People seize on painting to cover up their nakedness. They get what they can wherever they can. In the end I don’t believe they get anything at all. They’ve simply cut a coat to the measure of their ignorance.”
((May we change the word painting to traveling, work, etc., etc.??))
Play of mind
Picasso: “There is nothing extraordinary about that pair of shoes but somehow or other I like them. One of these days I’m going to go in and see if they fit me…”
Sabartes: “Why not now?”
P: “I’m not in a hurry. Let it go for some day when we get out a little earlier. You know I don’t need them right away.”
S: “As long as they appeal to you what harm would there be in asking?”
P: “Of course there would some harm! If we went in it would take a lot of time. They’d start a conversation, and then every time we went by we’d have to greet tem. You know I don’t mind this; but after two or three months we’d get to be friends, and then I’d have to worry about the health of the grandfather, the father, the baby… and on top of it all I’d have to take the shoes.”
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“I have reached the moment, you see, when the movement of my thought interests me more than the thought itself.”
“If only I could tear out my brain and use only my eyes.”
Pragmatism/ Life
"Good artists borrow; great artists steal."
“The important thing is to do, and nothing else; be what it may.”
“If you know exactly what you are going to do, what’s the good of doing it? There’s no interest in something you know already. It’s much better to do something else.”
“You mustn’t always believe what I say. Questions tempt you to tell lies, particularly when there is no answer.”
He said to Brassai, late in his life, "I no longer want to see new faces. Why should I? But I am always here to my friends...and their visits are that much more precious to me because I live in seclusion..."
“And in the end when the work is there, the painter has already gone.”
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