Woman with cigarette 1903

Picasso painted 'Woman with Cigarette', using oil on canvas, sometime in his life. The colours are muted, predominantly blues and greens, built up in layers, like a hazy memory. You can almost see the artist circling around his subject, trying to capture her essence through colour and form. There's a real tension between the flatness of the picture plane and the illusion of depth he's trying to create. It’s like he's wrestling with the paint, pushing and pulling it to make her come alive. Her hands, one holding the cigarette, are particularly interesting. They're almost ghostly, rendered in pale hues, as if fading into the background. I'm reminded of Gauguin, actually, that same interest in flattening the image to create these powerful blocks of colour, which is something Picasso would later revisit in his Cubist period. For me, the painting is less about a specific person and more about the act of seeing, painting, and questioning what it means to represent someone on canvas.