Bust of woman 1907

This ‘Bust of a Woman’ by Pablo Picasso is made with oil on canvas. It’s a portrait, but not in the conventional sense. The colors are muted, earthy, a limited palette of oranges, pinks, and browns, and the brushstrokes are loose and visible, giving you the feeling that you are watching Picasso work it out. It’s like you’re in the studio with him, seeing how the painting evolves. Look at how he's used black lines to define the features – the eyes, the nose, the outline of the face – it’s bold and graphic, almost like a sketch. There's this one little dot of orange on her chest, a tiny detail, but it brings the whole composition together. It's like a punctuation mark, a little surprise that catches your eye. It's what Picasso does so well, taking something ordinary and making it extraordinary through the simplest of gestures. You could almost see a trace of Matisse here in the handling of color, but Picasso is doing his own thing, pushing the boundaries. It shows us that art is an endless conversation and how each painting is just one version of the story.