Woman with cap 1934

Pablo Picasso painted this “Woman with Cap” with oil on canvas, and you can see how he’s laying down these bright, jarringly flat blocks of colour. I imagine him wrestling with this image, building it up in layers, shifting the planes and colours around until they lock into place. I'm trying to get into his head, what he might have been thinking as he built up this face—lilac on one side, green on the other—connected by a simple dark red line drawing the profile. The cap is kind of hilarious: a yellow square framing a pink square, teetering above her brow. The green is sickly and the lilac almost bruised. I imagine Picasso was riffing off other artists, maybe Matisse, pushing and pulling at the conventions of portraiture to create something new and challenging. It's like he's saying, "Here’s a face, but it’s also just paint, just shapes, just colour." That’s what keeps me coming back to painting, that conversation with the past, that push towards something new. It's a conversation, and we're all invited to join in.