The soup 1903

Picasso made this poignant painting, The Soup, with oil on canvas, and you can almost feel the act of painting itself. Imagine Picasso, shifting and adjusting, intuitively finding his way through the composition. I sympathize with Picasso here. He's swimming in that blue period, right? All those tonal hues create such a mood. What might he have been thinking? Maybe about the material aspects of painting, such as texture, color, surface, and the physicality of the medium itself. Look at how thinly he's applied the paint. See how the strokes in the background bleed and communicate a feeling of longing or despair. That's what paint can do: become a gesture, laden with meaning. His blue period is, in my opinion, in conversation with the work of other painters. It's all an ongoing exchange of ideas across time, inspiring one another’s creativity. It is a form of embodied expression which embraces ambiguity and uncertainty, allowing for multiple interpretations.