What I Learned at the Picasso Exhibit

Last Friday, Mighty Reader and I spent a couple of hours at the Seattle Art Museum's special Picasso exhibit, 150 (I think) pieces on loan from the Picasso Museum in Paris, dating from 1901 (I think) to maybe 1970. I could look all of these facts up for you, but none of them is really that important. What really matters is that a large cross-section, a longitudinal study if you will, of Pablo Picasso's works were gathered together and displayed more-or-less in chronological order.

If you have a chance to go to an art museum, you really should. Especially if you can look at works of art you only know from books (or worse, from the internets), because seeing them in real life can really change the way you perceive the works. I can't count the number of times I've been at a museum and run into a painting or drawing I know and in real life it's been either much larger or much smaller than I thought it was. Really, size matters in this regard.

Many of the Picasso drawings I knew, for example, turn out to be not much larger than postcards, and so the level of detail seems to be compressed and somehow much greater when you see how tiny the pieces really are. And some of the paintings were very small as well, and the effect is radically different when the three women bathing are all seven inches tall when you thought they'd be three or four feet tall.

But none of that's really what I learned; I already knew those things and had a fabulous reminder last year when there was an Impressionism exhibit and I walked into a room to find myself face to face with a Titian that was six feet tall and ten feet wide and the figures were all literally larger-than-life. That was very cool. But as I say, all of this is not the point.

No, here's the thing. Picasso went through a lot of phases with his art. In the beginning he was more or less a realist, though clearly influenced by Impressionism. His "blue" period was pretty much straight portraiture and you can see Rembrandt, for instance, influencing the paintings. Then around the turn of the century Picasso started to break down the three dimensions and invent Cubism and that developed over the next several decades, but it was alongside a sort of high-graphic illustrative style that bordered on cartoon but owed a clear debt to the Renaissance artists with their interest in movement and weight of solid bodies and the animation of living things. A lot of Pablo's later stuff was just weird; I could see what he was doing but it didn't send me at all.

Mostly, I came away thinking that this was a guy who was always experimenting and looking and pushing at the forms and coming up with new solutions to problems of space and figural representation and color (though not so much as time went on with the color, I don't think) and foreground/background and visual planes and all of that. Immense variety in his output. And yet, through it all, there is Picasso in all of the work. When you see it gathered together it becomes clear what forces connect the weird bicycle seat/handlebar "bull's head" with the big bronze goat (cool!) and the stick figure "bather" sculptures and the "Guernica" painting and the "violin" sheetmetal sculpture and the cubist portraits of Dora and the sketches and paintings of children and the drawings of churches and villages and the realist portraits. You see Picasso's hand in all of it no matter the style or the medium, in a career that spanned 70 or whatever years.

Pablo Picasso (and is it just me who always automatically hears the Burning Sensations' version of Jonathan Richman's "Pablo Picasso" whenever the artist is mentioned?) didn't have a vision, a unifying theme to his art, not if you ask me. But he had a lot of ideas and he pursued them and he never tried to do anything except in a way that pleased him, at least from what I could see. I have no idea if there were market forces at work, controlling his output, but really if you were there in the galleries with the paintings and drawings and sculptures you'd not think it possible that Pablo created anything with the audience in mind. Some of his ideas or visions or whathaveyou were just off-putting (his images of couples having sex were just awful and there was a guy, I kept thinking, who had some serious issues with women and men), but they were still individualistic and brave and seriously intentioned, I think.

I don't care what you think of Picasso's art in an aesthetic sense; this guy was the real deal and showed no fear when he made art. I should look for comments about Picasso from Ezra Pound, because Pound once claimed that "No art ever grew by looking into the eyes of the public" and I believe his claim, and I'm willing to bet that Pound would have supported Picasso even if he didn't particularly like the art.

When I was looking at the Picasso exhibit I thought about people like Samuel Beckett and James Joyce, who were also breaking down the perceptions of their art in the early 20th century (if "Malloy" wasn't influenced by "Ulysses," I'll eat my hat), and then I thought about people like Iris Murdoch and Joyce Carol Oates who also pushed against the bastion of literature to make room for their own particular visions of narrative, and I thought about how brave it is to strike out on one's own and slip into the forest of Unknown to see what's in there, to clear a field and build our own houses and sow what seeds we have newly imagined.

So that's what--to bring this long and rambling post to a conclusion--I learned at the Picasso Exhibit: to be an artist is to be brave. To be an artist is to have an idea or two and to pursue those ideas and to not be frightened by the possibility that people will think you're an idiot. God knows that Picasso, Joyce, Beckett, Murdoch, Oates, Burroughs, Coatzee, Eliot, Lawrence, Naipul, Woolf, Faulkner, Porter, Stein, et alia have all been subject to ridicule but produced what they produced despite the criticism. So be brave, that's all. Look inside for your inspiration, not at the bookshelves. Be brave and mighty enough to be yourself. That's what I learned from Pablo Picasso.

Also! We ran into Ben Thompson, author of the fabulous epic nonfiction book Badass. Ben was at the museum with his lovely wife. He still hasn't signed my copy of Badass. I try not to be bitter.

If You Were Rothko...

Do you know Mark Rothko? He was an abstract expressionist painter who spent much of his time painting very large canvases with rectangles of color.

Here's an image of one of his paintings, taken from Wikipedia:

I've been a fan of Rothko's work for years, but it wasn't until 2009 at the Tate gallery in London that I saw his paintings the way they were supposed to be seen. When Rothko allowed his works to be viewed, he was very careful to specify the type of lighting he preferred (usually dim), the height at which they were to be displayed on the wall (sometimes close to the floor, sometimes several feet up), what other works were allowed to be displayed alongside his work...he even specified at what distance he preferred his viewers to look at his work (sometimes 18 inches, which is very close considering his paintings are larger than any large screen TV I've ever seen.)

These mandates by the artist might seem out of line, and maybe some would say Rothko wasn't even a very good artist, considering all he ever painted were rectangles. When I saw the exhibit at the Tate, the first thing I felt at trying to view his higher-placed paintings in dim lighting was frustration. I could barely see them. They were just blurry spaces, almost like ghosts of color. Frankly, I didn't like them at all.

But, I found myself thinking of these works weeks after I left the gallery. Not only did I like them more, but I found myself wanting to see them again...or, more accurately to experience them again. Rothko wanted his work to be displayed in a particular way because he wanted to envelop us with his color, to create something that surrounds us in an intimate way. And, without me knowing that, I suddenly longed for it. Only a year later--last weekend to be exact--did I learn about what his intentions were.

Rothko, in my opinion, was a brilliant artist. To compare his work to those of Rembrandt or Renoir or Dali or Munch would be pointless because he had created something new, something unique. And, when he was faced with wanting to do something that no one else had done before, he didn't change his work to conform. Instead, he changed the viewers, he trained people to see his work.

All the rules that I talk about, all the tools I present here will only get you so far. And, if you follow them perfectly, chances are you will end up sounding like everyone else who has learned to follow the rules. (Granted, a lot of people won't even get that far.) You can change your work if you think you are improving it. But, don't change your work because the world hasn't learned how to see it. Teach us. What would you demand of your readers if you were Mark Rothko? What rules would you give us so that you didn't have to conform to rules yourself?

Genre Wars Contest Ending Thoughts

Thank you so much to everyone who participated in our Genre Wars contest, either by entering your work, by spreading the word, or simply by not calling us names when you heard about it.

We closed our submissions late Tuesday night, ending with far more entries than we had anticipated. (I was personally hoping for 50 pieces, and we got a lot more than 50.) Michelle, Scott, and I are now in the process of reading and reviewing each story. All three of us have our own ranking scales, and--though we agree on some great stories--there are plenty that we will have to debate and discuss when we're done. I think we're all excited about that and hope that we don't resort to cannibalism as a way of making our case.

As you all know, the submissions process was kept anonymous to the three of us. All emails sent to our joined address was only opened by our very dedicated and selfless helper, Becca Brown--thank you so much, Becca! Occasionally she forwarded some non-contest-related messages to us, but everything else was kept secret. Only after our decision process is over will we allow ourselves to see the names of the authors, and we're still not sure if we will look at writers of the stories we don't accept.

Do you all have opinions on that?

Next, we're going to finish all of our work and put together the anthology. Winners from each genre will be announced on January 7th, and the "best of show" winner will be announced as well. Each of these stories will be in the anthology, and we'll also post them up on our blog, along with interviews of the writers. Additionally, several other stories will be selected for the anthology. And, of course our little prizes.

When we sell the anthology (as a POD publication) all of the proceeds will be donated to one of the charity groups we feature here--we're not done with that part of things yet. The charity group will be voted on by readers.

And, since the three of us have been debating on what to do about the cover of the anthology, we thought we'd invite anyone who is interested to submit a cover idea. So, spread the word to your artist friends! We'll also be coming up with some ideas of our own, hopefully. That's right, it's a contest for a contest. But a far less organized one.

Send your entries as a .jpg attachment to LiteraryLab (at) gmail (dot) com by December 21st 12:00 p.m. PST. All artwork must be original and you must be the copyright holder in order for us to use your cover art!

Tell Me About Yourselves

As I'm visiting everyone else's blogs, I've been wondering a lot about what everyone writes and how much experience they have.

I've been interested in art for most of my life. As a child I played music, and as a teenager I painted. In college I continued to study painting and sculpture, but I managed to take one creative writing class in the last quarter of my senior year. For whatever reason, I've stuck with the writing. I 've been doing it seriously for about eight years. I try to write literary fiction, almost always with multiple main characters. I love the idea of writing an "epic."

What about all of you? How long have you been writing and what do you mainly writing? What turned you onto writing in the first place?

Nonwritten Influences

A few of us have gone back and forth discussing who our writing influences are. For me, I'm also significantly influenced by other art forms.

Movies are more of a natural influence. I tend to write stories with multiple main characters and multiple story lines, so movies like American Beauty, Closer, and Princess Mononoke have been very influential to me. I watch them over and over again to learn how to pace multi-character stories and how to transition from one character to another.

But, other forms of art also inspire me. I love the music of Radiohead, for example. Whenever I listen to their album, OK Computer, I immediately feel like I want to duplicate what they are doing musically in my writing. Shostakovich also inspires me this way, as do the paintings of Agnes Martin and Paul Gauguin, just to name a few.

An obvious problem arises. How does one translate these different art forms into writing?

Can it be done?

One of the things I love about OK Computer is that the musicians make use of these intricate counterpoint lines to balance the main melodies. When the singer finishes a phrase, and before he starts a new one, another line of music rises up in the gap to keep your attention. These lines often overlap so that as one sound is tapering off, another is just developing. In my writing, though, I've never been able to do anything close to this. I've always felt trapped by the fact that our writing is so linear, that readers can only pick up one word, or one sentence, at a time. Poet John Ashbery has experimented with having poems that are meant to be read simultaneously, but I'm sure that borders on the fringe of what readers are willing to put up with. I know in my own experience of that particular poem (I think it was in The Tennis Court Oath, but I may be wrong) was that I ended up not understanding anything.

So, I often ask myself it is a pointless pursuit to try and translate music or painting into my writing? Perhaps the beauty of these separate art forms are that they are, indeed, separate. But, I realize that part of my motivation to write is so that I can take part in the creation of art that I find to be beautiful, and it saddens me to think that some things are "off limits".

Do you think that other forms of art can ever be more than just an inspiration to your art? Can you steal techniques from other artists the way you can steal from other writers?