Picasso writes a sentence.
It seems the sentence is fantastic, clever, and doesn't make sense.
But that's okay, it's Picasso.
I am going to tell you something so profound it will knock your socks off. You should put on some socks just to see them go flying off. And this doesn't come from books or anything, this is a unique insight. I think. A professor might go, "I want to argue with that little sh|t."
This is how sign language is. Because you don't know what he's going to draw, hadn't the key frame given it away. And drawing it feels like this. A bit here, a bit there, here a bit, there a bit, background, mid ground, foreground running, verbs are acted, "chicken head goes on" This is how early Chinese is. This is how hieroglyphic murals are. This is Picasso writing a sentence like they wrote at the beginning of writing and still write in pictures.
It's basic with conventions that are plastic. There is no agreed upon spelling. And there won't be until just recently. Grammar is only beginning to form.
Then, the modern linguist opens their tool kit for analysis, and they are apt tools for this sort of thing, and they tell us the sentence is stative and the predicates must match subject in number and sex, and the flower leafs as fish fins as chicken feathers, garden on fish on chicken, render the whole thing plural reflexive appositive past pluperfect.
Picasso turn back and looks at you. "Well, they certainly analyzed me." But they won't be drawing many pictures or bringing down any fabulous ideas.
8 comments:
So you don't think he had the whole idea for a flowery fish chicken in his head before he began drawing? You're probably right. My take is that he had the flowery fish part of it, the visual idea of that in his head, before he began. My guess, and that's all it is, is that the chicken part was an add-on. Something that "came to him" at the end.
I would think that without the visual "idea" first, there would have been some hesitance in his drawing, in the actual speed and decisiveness of his strokes. But there is no searching around for the right stroke, none at all. Picasso famously said, "Others search, I find."
YES!!!
No socks to knock off, although I did actually use the word "fucksocks" in jest with MrM this very day for the first time ever, having never heard of the word before witnessing an event that made it real in my mind, with it coming back for spoken use today at just the right moment, in a process similar to the way a flower turns into a chicken, with one thing leading to another.
How many times does it take to hear the ancient story known as "Creation", the one that starts with "In the beginning...", before the click happens, with an mental exclamation resulting that ranges anywhere from "Aha!" through "Fucksocks!!" to "Zounds!!!"???
One thing leads to another. Always. And it all hangs and connects together, in the simplest and most complex ways known and imaginable to man
Fun to see this unfold in Picasso's sentence here, and consider/reconsider the connections to language and sign formation.
For years (in the age before instant internet access) I kept a copy of Picasso's drawing of Eight States of the Bull hanging on the wall as an example of essence. Which may account for why I also delight in the drawings ChipA does, in which he starts with a single line signifying something and then builds a picture that eventually replicates and morphs into a photo reality, as the process is a reverse of what Picasso was doing with the bull.
Fun post. The drawing will stay in my head for a while, parked next to "fucksocks" until it finds another use or application, or reason to move.
Over Richmond. United has wifi in the plane.
ricpic, yes, I think he had a very good idea where he was going with this. He probably did this doodle before. The whole setup is, "okay now Mr. Picasso, say something."
My shits have better artistic expression compared to this pre-school executed finger painting.
Those are pretty good shits. Do they tell stories like this?
Oh my shits tell all kinds of stories, but that might be too much tmi than most people want to know. If you ever come to San Diego, we'll go grab a bite to eat and a beer and tell you a couple of stories. :D
Picasso famously said, "Others search, I find."
And some people give up on the search, because it's easier to do that, than find and have to live with those results.
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