Picasso meets Street Art

 

Today's #sothebyssundaysketch subject matter was Picasso's doodle drawings of his female muses. I studied Picasso in my art GCSE classes, alongside Braque, with a particular emphasis on Cubism. In my large sketchbook, I experimented with drawing a Cubist apple in pencil in the style of one of Picasso's still life works I'd glued in for reference. I also glued on a picture of Braque Cubist collage and extended it imaginatively, painting his plank of wood even longer and adding a guitar collage at the bottom of the page. Previously, I had done something similar with a Bonnard painting by extending it but this time, I stayed with the same style, colours and objects as him. I found these exercises very useful for developing my art technique which in turn improved my own original works. I also filled a ringbinder file on art history, with notes on artists, art critique and theory about artworks, including full colour print outs of examples of artists' works. Delving into art history and theory as well as researching artists and art movements started then and has continued ever since. This was furthered when I then studied art at a higher level with another art teacher who developed my art process and practice by encouraging me to put even more creative, conceptual thought into it. She showed me how to think up my own topic and go wherever the art and my imagination take me, while putting the ideas together as a project in stages.  

As part of my art practice, I use art history as a reference point and love to pour over images of artworks, thinking about the art movements they reflect. So I took a look at various pictures of Picasso's doodling portraits and decided to combine a few frequent features in them: 

• Picasso's use of thick, bold lines for drawing facial outlines / features
• His muses are often looking to the right, as you look at the picture
• Using newspapers as a background to draw on, giving his doodles more meaning and visual interest
• Red doodle lines on the face
• Although many were monochrome drawings, some were layered with a few colours, either as thinner, coloured lines or as blocks of colour, reminiscent of Frida Kahlo's sketchbook with bold, colourful drawings.

Blue was Picasso's favourite colour so although it's not a predominant colour in his doodles, I chose it as my main marker pen colour. A black pen would have disappeared against the dark, black crossword boxes, making whole sections of my doodle too difficult to see. So I thought about which colours would stand out against the black areas of the puzzle and decided to use more than one colour to build up the doodling marks and expressiveness, rather than end up with a monocolour (blue) line drawing. I chose a yellow marker to complement the blue lines and red to boldly stand out and highlight sections of the doodle. 

I rummaged through several newspapers before selecting this crossword puzzle page. Cubist art uses written articles in their collages so I initially searched for which topic and article I wanted to doodle on. However, when I saw the puzzle page, I thought this would make for an excellent background to this portrait for several reasons: 

• One, I can work with the lines the puzzles create on the page to create an interesting composition by working around how the puzzles provide pre-existing words and dark shading to her face. For instance, I have placed her mouth next to "crosswords", So that 'words' are near her heart-shaped lips, to give the impression she is not silent. So the print on the page dictated how I drew my muse's face. 
• Two, the puzzles provide Cubist-like box shapes, referring back to Picasso's art movement, alongside his other approach, Surrealism. 
• Three, the puzzle boxes on the page mirror the angular cardboard box. 

I collected a few of these 3-sided boxes last year because they are similar to the structure of a canvas. I wrapped the newspaper around the cardboard box to get a sense of the dimensions of it before beginning to doodle in order to plan my composition. Recently, I have been reading about how the Impressionists and Cassatt mounted their pastel works onto canvas, So I cross-applied this idea to mounting my newspaper on a canvas-shaped cardboard box. The newspaper is wrapped around all the edges of the box. If you look at the artwork from different angles, you can see how the doodle carries on off-the-page and around the corner.  

My cardboard box reminded me of Adam Neate, a well-known street artist who had the fabulous idea of doing art on cardboard which he left as donations and later left around the streets for anybody and everybody to pick up and take home with them. Just as Neate's cardboard boxes were found objects (recycling waste), so were mine - they were sold as trays in a packet of biscuits I was eating! Neate's subject matter of figurative drawing and portraits coheres with Picasso's doodles, and both are ground-breaking styles in the history of art so I thought they would match up well when I combine them in this artwork. Indeed, Neate cites Picasso as one of his major artistic influences so the two styles are quite  compatible with each other, despite belonging to different art movements.

In this work, I wanted to join the artistic conversation in art history between Neate and Picasso and explore how to further the ideas in their works. Street Art is inherently public art and accessible to all, so posting it on the internet is a way of achieving this open accessibility of art, outside the world of galleries, especially now when art galleries are closed. Although I am not about to leave my cardboard artworks around the streets, I love Neate's idea of doing that! I wish I had found one - I certainly would have taken it home to enjoy 🙂 🖼😍 👍 not have thrown it in the bin! 🗑😱😭 I think it was a creative, fun, engaging way for him to spread his passion for art and involve everyone in the aesthetic experience of looking at art, no matter who they are or whether they can afford to buy art or not. There needs to be a certain amount of Free Art (ie. free to view or even sometimes own) around in the world, otherwise art and the aesthetic experience of looking at art cannot become part of everyone's life.

 Art is, and always has been, a natural part of everyday life, as can be seen by elaborate cave paintings! And if people feel alienated from having easy access to artworks, then the commercial and gallery sides of the art world will suffer anyway in the long run, through disinterest in art at a societal level. So I think creative approaches to curating artworks in public, such as Neate's Open Gallery exhibition in the street and local Art Festival events which can include permanent outdoor artworks, are a fun and vital aspect of the art world and generate a love of art 💖🖼.

 In keeping with this accessible approach to art, I curate my artworks in my online gallery on Pinterest, where every Pinterest board functions as though it were a virtual room in a gallery, exhibiting a particular collection of works: 

https://www.pinterest.co.uk/libakauckyArtPhotoGallery/ 

It's a continuous work in progress as I add to my gallery and/or move art works around from one virtual room to another.