A Nod to Picasso, and Our Owls

Well, it took me all my life, I guess, to find that Picasso had a pet owl.  Who da' thunk?  Just goes to show you never stop learning.

Several months ago I went down to Picasso's Black and White exhibit at the MFAH.  Wow!  I was expecting drawings on paper and was amazed at the pieces he had.  I actually had scheduled a spot in a workshop at Texas Art Supply, and totally lost myself in the art.  Wandered out about four hours later to have found that I totally missed the workshop!  Oh, well!

A couple pictures, and at the end some quotes by Picasso.  First, here's one by Steve Jobs:

"Picasso had a saying. He said, 'Good artists copy, great artists steal.' We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas. Part of what made the Macintosh great was the people who were working on it were musicians, poets, artists, historians, zoologists, who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world."   Very true.  Very nice.

So, here's the man with his owl.  And, a little owl that I carved.  It's pretty impossible for me to sit still in front of a TV, so if I want to sit down with my family and actually watch something, I have to have busy hands.  So, I carved this little guy.  Since I finished him during the Olympics, I'm calling him my Olympic Owl. :)

Among other things, I collect quotes.  I LOVE quotes!  Here are a bunch of my favs from Pablo himself:

 (to Matisse)   I’ve mastered drawing and am looking for color: you’ve mastered color and are looking for drawing.

“Art is theft.”

People who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree.

What do you think an artist is?  An imbecile who has only eyes, if he is a painter? …No, painting is not done to decorate apartments.  It is an instrument of war.

The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.

Drawing is not form, it is a way of seeing form.

“To my distress and perhaps to my delight, I order things in accordance with my passions.  What a sad thing for a painter who loves blondes but denies himself the pleasure of putting them in his picture because they don’t go well with the basket of fruit!  What a misery for a painter who detests apples to have to use them all the time because they harmonize with the tablecloth!  I put in my pictures everything I like.  So much the worse for the things – they have to get along with each other.”

I have always believed, and still believe, that artists who live and work with spiritual values cannot and should not remain indifferent to a conflict in which the highest values of humanity and civilization are at stake.

I’m always saying to myself: ‘That is not right yet.  You can do better.’  It’s rare when I can prevent myself from taking a thing up again… Sometimes it becomes an obsession.

There is nothing more interesting than people.  One paints and one draws to learn to see people, to see oneself.

To know what you want to draw, you have to begin drawing it.

No, painting is not made to decorate apartments.  It’s an offensive and defensive weapon against the enemy.

One never knows what one is going to do.  One starts a painting and then it becomes something quite different.

How awful for a painter who loathes apples to have to use them all the time because they go so well with the cloth.  I put all the things I like in my pictures.