Madame Soler 1905

Picasso painted Madame Soler using oil paint on canvas at some point - we don’t know exactly when. Look at the way the blue seeps into everything, even the highlights on her blouse have a bluish tinge. I wonder, what's it like to be Picasso at this point? He’s not yet "Picasso," but he's someone – probably wearing a cool hat – who's already restlessly absorbing everything around him. I imagine him thinking, how can I make this face…real? You know, in that way that painting can sometimes do. I'm looking at the blue ground, and it feels like he’s building this woman out of thin air. I mean, that face is really there; he really saw that face, and felt it. What I love about paintings, is that they are made stroke by stroke by a human, just like us! It’s like he is asking, "How can I describe this feeling?" rather than trying to record something in front of him. Painters are always having a conversation with each other, across time, about how to solve these problems. I see his conversation here with painters like El Greco, and it makes me want to run back to the studio and start one of my own.