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Picasso is said to have explained that he’d sometimes leave a painting unfinished and set the canvas aside in the corner of the studio. Weeks, months or even years later, he’d uncover that canvas to discover, lo and behold, it had magically resolved itself on its own.
Today’s post is an illustration of the point.
For more than a few years (I’d guess seven), the above paintings have been “flattening” between the pages of a hefty Random House dictionary in the corner of my studio. Each was housed there with the intention of continuing at some future moment. Yet, that moment never arrived. Upon discovering one after the other this week, I realized they had brought themselves to conclusion on their own.
The mechanism driving this bit of aesthetic alchemy is probably multifold. Even if they aren’t masterpieces, they do stand as unreproducible relics of a lost painter. The doors to that former self now closed, these works retroactively connect-the-dots to subsequent evolution.
Call it the aesthetics of compassion - increased self acceptance on the part of the painter leads to a tempering of the hypercritical eye. Could Picasso’s tale have been a wink and nod at the availability of maturation as another tool at the artist’s disposal?
