A red skirt 1901

Picasso made this squatting figure with pastels, in tones of blood red, mossy green, and sickly yellow. Imagine him hunched over the paper, building up those marks, one after another, coaxing this woman into being. I know that sensation of trying to extract something from the depths of yourself. What was he thinking? Perhaps he was exploring the relationship between interiority and exteriority, the visible and the invisible. He was always doing that kind of thing. See how the red of the skirt bleeds into the green of the ground, creating a kind of earthy, grounded feeling? And look at the scratchy marks describing the woman's skin. It's like he’s trying to capture not just her form, but also her mood, her inner state. You can see the influence of artists like Degas in his work; they were all in conversation. For Picasso, like many painters, the act of painting was a way of thinking, feeling, and questioning. He embraced the ambiguity of art, knowing that it can never be fully resolved.