Still life with bottle of rum 1911

Pablo Picasso made Still Life with Bottle of Rum with oil on canvas, and it's all about how we see, and how painting can mess with that. Look at how he builds the image with these little planes of color. Browns, greens, greys - like he’s building a world out of cardboard. You can almost feel the grit of the pigment. Then he comes in with these lines, scratching into the surface, kind of mapping out the space. See that little coil toward the bottom? Is it a shadow, a flourish, or a rogue thought? The surface is a jumble, kind of like how our minds work, piecing things together from different angles. I think of Cezanne, another master of seeing, when I look at this. Except Picasso tips the whole thing on its head. For both, it’s less about what’s there and more about how we see it. And maybe, how we can remake it.