On Fidelity, Finding Your Eye & Quiche Lorraine.

Today, I’m going to share with you my tour of the museum and the thoughts that bubbled forth as the day unfolded¹. This might feel like it jumps around a little, but that’s kind of the point. I’m trying something new. I hope it isn’t too jarring. (But part of me kind of doesn’t care if you do. You’ll see why.)

May 7, 2024
Musée Picasso, Paris

A loud pop could be heard from the rooftops surrounding the balcony café.

My prefrontal cortex had given up and decided to explode. I stared into the middle distance as I chewed away on a lukewarm quiche Lorraine, pondering Picasso.

It was Tuesday. I’d eked out precisely half an afternoon —a halfternoon, if you don’t mind— to slink away from my book deadline and do something interesting. The sun was finally out, so I took a very sweaty jog along the Seine and back through the Tuileries, followed by my first-ever visit to the Musée Picasso.

“I'm not really that interested in the fidelity of appearances. I'd rather draw my idea of a bird than what a bird actually looks like.”

(I know, right? The balls on this guy!) However, this quote doesn’t belong to Picasso; it was spoken by the indispensable Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin & Hobbes, in his exploration of process in his most recent book project. I quote it here because it echoed throughout my cavernous skull every time I ascended another staircase. A puzzle piece clicked into place as I left each room, and now I can’t see anything the same way again.

This newsletter is about process; the creative journey an artist goes through when they write a song, paint a picture, scribble a poem, chisel a sculpture— basically make something from nothing. This journey is the thing that has had me obsessively poring over the creative lives of the world’s most influential and prolific artists, attempting to pluck useful insights from their world to share with you.

The important thing to remember, though, is that this creative process doesn’t begin when you sit down to work. The creative process begins long before when you’re thinking through the idea, filtering the world through your unique mental lens, and building out the execution of an idea in your head. Unless you’re sitting down to draw ‘stream of consciousness’ lines on a page apropos of nothing, your creative process begins (and ends) with your mind; your perception of reality.

(I’d love to hear your thoughts about this in the comments. I’m opening them up for 30 days to non-paid subscribers.)

I have Christoph Niemann’s famous ‘Abstract-O-Meter’ pinned above my drawing board in my studio, but it never really clicked until now. If you’ll afford me one last exasperated analogy— seeing this volume of Picasso’s work up close was like someone just handed me glasses with a new prescription.

I want to dive into fidelity and finding your eye, but let’s find our feet…

Pablo Picasso.

The man, the myth, one of the inventors of Cubism. A pioneer in Surrealism, and arguably the most renowned, the most viewed, the most studied, as well as the most controversial artist of the 20th century. He has several museums dedicated to his work. This one is excellent. It is located in the Hôtel Salé in the Marais district in Paris.

Musée Picasso is located in the Hôtel Salé in the Marais district and features three main floors where visitors can explore Picasso's works and related exhibitions. The building itself, an impressive example of 17th-century architecture, also includes a basement level used for additional exhibition space and bodies for those who ‘literally died’.

My favorite thing about him was his constant ability to reinvent himself;

to experiment and explore new ways of representing reality throughout his art. As the museum puts it, Paintings, sculptures, ceramics, drawings, and prints from all his various periods testify to the breadth of these explorations. I love that he calls his studio a laboratory; I feel the same way about mine. (Mainly due to the weird smells.)

I spent three hours dragging my jaw along the tiles, each room presenting the next stage of the evolution of the artist. It’s all very carefully curated to unravel as you ascend the building to the attic.

It wasn’t just Picasso on display; there were works by Renoir and Picabia, as well as other artists. There were paintings, sculptures, mixed media pieces, scribblings, sketches, poems— a smorgasbord of tangible, wildly inventive art across several creative lifetimes. They all played a part in distinguishing what it is for an artist to pull elements from the world, interpret them, and share those elements they’ve chosen to include in a way that expresses their idea about those elements.

Everything I’d come to understand about building a lens through which to interpret the things I see through words, lines, shapes, even sound— it all kind of started to cohere into a unified theory. My lens of the world is mine, and mine alone, which is the intrinsic value I bring to the world with my work. This is a fundamental truth I’ve always known intellectually; it just all finally became much clearer as the hours passed.

The fidelity of the elements also doesn’t have to match everyone’s expectations; A duck doesn’t have to look precisely like a duck to be a duck. If it’s how you decide to draw a duck, then it’s a duck. (Duck the haters.) It took gazing into dozens of works to arrive here, fashionably late as ever. It’s a nice feeling but also very overwhelming. Where do I start? What do I make? What do I have to say?

As @Linescapes.Drawing puts it very eloquently… (Source)

📖 The Poetry Nook

One of my favourite rooms resembled a real-world Noted post: a small, darkened room hidden to the side, with Picasso’s mad scrawlings, poetry, and notes on various surfaces. Some of the work looked like it was falling out of him. Other pages looked like they were being extracted with all the grace of a gallstone.

🐑 Man with Lamb

There’s a wooden attic space dedicated to Picasso’s 1943 piece, ‘Man with a Lamb’. He designed it while he was living in Nazi-occupied Paris and insisted that he intended no symbolism or message. It’s hard not to find one, though. Lamb looks fucking uncomfortable.

I prefer the rough sketch to the finished sculpture. Glad he captured the testicles. Well done, Pablo.

At one point, I was leering at the above exploratory sketch when I couldn’t help but overhear a couple having a hushed, deeply intellectual exchange, so I quickly sketched it up:

I had to check if it wasn’t Karl Pilkington

At this point, I thought it might be best to leave the room and let the poor man in green have a little conniption under the pitched roof. I slunk into the next room to find a woman on her phone before of one of Henri Matisse's masterpieces from Picasso's personal collection, 'Nature morte aux oranges’. (I assumed she was just looking for her camera app to take a photo, but when I got closer, I saw she was doing the Wordle. )

(Maybe that day’s word was ‘Henri’.)

Once you get to the room of portraits of his muse and lover, Dora Maar, it’s game over. You can just sit there looking at all these variations for hours, finding new things in each one from wherever you’re standing.

A woman was sitting on the bench when I walked in. An old man eventually waddled in and joined her. They both just sat there and looked in absolute silence before, after about two minutes, the old man let out a spontaneous laugh. Couldn’t tell you why. Nothing happened.

So, here I sat, meditating on Matisse with a mouthful of quiche.

What if the things I drew only made sense to me alone? What if they would never find an audience, much less a forgiving eye, to interpret it in such a way as to find their own meaning in it? What if I stopped drawing according to the fantastical expectations of an imagined audience and just started creating things the way I want to create them?

Well. I could.

The thought gradually consumed me: With the exception of getting a very specific brief from an art director on an advertising assignment that requires a very specific method for a very specific audience, there’s no good reason I couldn’t go forward with creating my own art in accordance with my own rules, having parsed them through my uniquely honed prism. Surely, it couldn’t be that hard?

Eventually, the security guard noticed my head tilting and came over to say something in French. I thought he was asking if I was ok, but it turns out he just wanted to borrow a chair. As he walked away, he held up his watch and said, “Soon, we close!”

I threw my scraps in the bin and did one last lap of the floors, this time with sketchbook in hand. I quickly took a scribble of a mask and a couple of sculptures before descending to the gift shop, where an unexpected gift awaited.

As the doors closed on an unforgettable halfternoon of wonder, I snatched up a couple of overpriced sketchbooks and a tin of Faber Castell watercolour pencils and took my place in line. I looked ahead to the cashier’s window and let out my own spontaneous laugh.

The kid behind the counter looked like fucking Salvador Dali, except the only thing melting was my brain. I couldn’t stop grinning at him. He didn’t seem amused at my guffaws. I sketched him in the courtyard as the doors closed behind me.

I had to Photoshop this photo because the photo I took on-site was blurry, and a Frenchman was yelling at me to move off the sidewalk.

1. A version of this article first appeared on New York Cartoons under the title “Quiche Lorraine on Pablo's Patio“