“Whenever I wanted to say something, I said it the way I believed I should.”
I am not a very artsy person. I cannot understand it very much! I researched some things for an assignment. I am now going to write the name of the artist whose creations I could connect with and somewhat understand and not understand.
It was Pablo Picasso. He was one of the biggest and the most influential artists in the 20th century. Picasso was a painter, a sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and a stage maker. He was ahead of his time and was one of the most celebrated artists of all time. His contribution in the field of Modern Art is inconceivable, an art form which is full of abstraction and has no logical formation, but questions the very existence of any structure and form.
Pablo's use of “Cubism” in his paintings reflects how simple shapes can evoke feelings and makes the process of understanding an artwork a “process”, a journey, where the artwork is slowly assimilated and understood by the person who views it.
Girl Before Mirror, 1932 by Pablo Picasso
Sometimes some scenes create a sense of Deja Vu. With Girl Before Mirror, I feel that I have been there. In the painting, there is a girl who looks in the mirror. Her real face is divided into two halves. One half of this girl is her painted version, where she applies a mask of paint and makeup on herself. This half of hers, smiles when she is offered a drink, and seems happy with her life. This aspect is probably what she would probably post in Instagram today. This painted half travels at different places in the world. She is independent and seems to need nobody. This side is her side during the day when she needs to be strong and look gentle at the same time.
The other half is her face without makeup and without any artifice. I can say this is how her face looks like before she goes to bed, devoid of makeup and pretense. She is not smiling because right now, she doesn’t need to tell the world what she is feeling right now. She is just her solemn self and believes that existing in this world is just another mundane task. She doesn’t need to bring about any change. She just exists and tomorrow will be just another day filled with mundane things and monotony. She is showing no emotion.
In the mirror, the woman’s reflection is again divided into two halves. One half of the reflection reflects darkness. It is basically a reflection of the artifice. The blackness indicates how pretense is just eating the girl and is leaving a hollowness, which is like a black hole. All the pretense and paint and the materialistic pleasures just leads her to the path of nothingness which is further leading her to darkness and despair. Amongst all the pretense, you one day just vanish in thin air. Its as if she just faded in the surroundings and lost herself being the ‘it’ girl.
The other half of the reflection reflects the inner turmoil of the solemn side, how she wants to cry as her weaknesses are reflected in the mirror. Her frustrations from being quiet, her inner struggles of not showing any emotion makes her want to cry and not face herself as tears trickle down breaking her inside every time she looks at herself. It is as if she has admitted defeat and accepted her fate. She doesn’t want to face herself anymore and just waits silently for life to end.
The imagery of the girl touching the mirror wants to console her reflection and tell her that it will be better. Logic says that if life brings you down, you can go up, only if the reflection could understand!
