The Picasso Effect

Exercise

Show a number of pictures or slides of photos from nature. Use clouds, waves, driftwood, seaweed, the human body, sand dunes etc. Ask students to write down what shapes they can see in these images. Ask them to explain what they see. Students could demonstrate the shapes by placing a blank overhead transparency over the printed one and with a marker indicate the shape they see.

Reading

"It seems strange to me that someone thought of making marble statues. I understand how you could see something in the root of a tree, a crack in the wall, in an eroded stone or pebble. But marble? It comes off in blocks and doesn't evoke any image. It does not inspire. How could Michelangelo have seen his David in a block of marble? Man began to make images only because he discovered them nearly formed around him, already within reach. He saw them in a bone, in the bumps of a cave, in a piece of wood. One form suggested a woman to him, another a buffalo, still another the head of a monster."

(An excerpt from Conversations with Picasso by Brassaï, Wednesday 20 October 1943)


The artist, according to Picasso, is able to see or project himself and his world in or onto Nature. This ability is the stimulation to draw for Picasso. Edward Wilson argues that this is an innate behaviour in humans and he classes it as an epigenetic rule (See Ariadne's Thread: Epigenetic rules - some clarification).

We could be so bold as to extend drawing to cover all forms of artistic representation including literature, as we have done with sympathetic magic and totemism of prehistoric cave drawings (see Primitive Art). Occasionally, as was found in the case of Chauvet, Upper paleolithic humans used and/or were inspired by the texture of the cave wall to paint and draw wild animals. That is, the natural marking on the walls reminded them of the bodies of animals; the drawings completed the images that they had formed in their minds. In other words the natural markings and what the artist sees in them could be regarded as a projection of an abstraction of the animal formed in the artist's mind (see The Law of Abstraction).

In analysing art we may be able to see the abstractions that inspired them, and dissect them out. In the next post we will study a scene from Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet : Act I Sc.5 The Sonnet

Return to
Nature, Art & Language