Where is your Picasso??
Feb 24, 2011Writing about Picasso’s guitars in the last posting had me question what it would be like to walk around life having Picasso’s vision. His art is an expression of the vision, but the vision itself — is it accessible to us, mortals?? Can we learn it? study it? develop it over time? What would it take to uncover a not-readily seen beauty in a bottle of water or a plastic spoon full of my breakfast oatmeal? I was up for an experiment.
An opening came from nothing less glamorous as a lid of NYC sewer. It was a very ordinary sewer lid, round, with sticky mud around the edges in a broken filthy sidewalk and a sign “NYC SEWER”, just in case one would get it confused with a passage into Alice’s wonderland.
But as I sharpened my vision and zoomed in on the object, leaving behind what I knew it to be and what was underneath it, I could suddenly see a pattern and texture that in my eyes had a value of beauty.
The rest was easy. Suddenly, most ordinary buildings, fences, stairs and floors were rushing to me to share their secrets.