House in a Garden 1908

Pablo Picasso made this small, muted oil painting, "House in a Garden," in an unknown year. The palette is like earth and stone, painted with a limited range of ochre, brown, and green, under a grey sky. It feels like he was trying to simplify the world into basic shapes and colours. I wonder what he was thinking? Maybe he was trying to find the essence of a house, or a garden, or a memory. It feels like he was stripping away all the unnecessary details to get to something fundamental. There's something about how the planes of colour meet, and how the brushstrokes follow the forms, that reminds me of Cézanne, like he was figuring out how to represent three-dimensional space on a flat surface. Each brushstroke feels like a decision, like he was carefully placing each one to create a specific effect. Painters are always in conversation with each other across time, inspiring each other's creativity. It embraces ambiguity and uncertainty, allowing for multiple interpretations and meaning over fixed or definitive readings.