Picasso's "Portrait of Sylvette David in Green Chair"...and "Guernica"

Hello, my favourite young people!

 

What’s shaking?  How’s things in the south today?  New Jersey is good – it’s raining again, but the last few days have been really pretty and I have high hopes for the weekend!

 

By the time you get this, it’ll be past Mother’s day, but I hope you had a good one and told your mom how amazing and wonderful and awesome she is!  :)  Moms are awesome!  I would have liked to see my mom for mother’s day, but couldn’t get out to Minnesota – plane tickets are so expensive.  But, soon Gram-E will live down there in Florida, and that’s a little easier to get to – plus, I get to see you guys when I come down there, so that is excellent. 

 

This week I’m sending images of Pablo Picasso’s work.  Picasso is known as one of the most important artists of the 20th century (the 100 years between 1900 and 2000), mostly for his work in Cubism and collage..and he’s pretty famous for putting people’s ears where their mouths should go and things like that, too – very funky.  At one point (in 1911), Picasso was considered a suspect for the theft of the Mona Lisa (a very famous painting) from the Louvre (a very famous art museum), but he didn’t do it.

His most famous painting is “Guernica”, the black and white one I’m putting in here…but I don’t actually like that one.  It’s too weird & sad for me.  It’s about a town that got bombed in the Spanish Civil War.  But, here is the cool thing about Picasso…when people asked him to explain the symbolism in Guernica, he said "It isn't up to the painter to define the symbols. Otherwise it would be better if he wrote them out in so many words! The public who look at the picture must interpret the symbols as they understand them."  And I think that is very cool.

 

My favourite cubist piece is Picasso’s “portrait of sylvette david in green chair”.  This week I tried to paint myself in the same style (mine is the one on the right – you can tell it’s me because it has a great big chin, like me) – it was much harder than I was expecting it to be!  This is Auntie Paula, not the official explanation, but Cubist really means taking soft curves and round things and making them hard, flat areas.  So where your neck in the real world is round (which is why necklaces make circles, not squares, in a cubist painting a neck looks more like a box.  The really really cubist paintings kind of look like lots and lots of little boxes arranged in shapes to look kind of like people…which is probably why I like this one better, because it still has some curves and looks like a mostly normal girl (except she does kind of have 2 ears on the one side of her head).

 

 

Know that I love you both very much and think that you are awesome.

Hugs and kisses,

Auntie Paula