Self-Portraits

Painting Title: Self Portrait with Cloak 1901
Pablo Picasso: Early/Blue Period Paintings
Famous Spanish artist - 20th Century Painter

About the Self Portrait Painting
Pablo Picasso painted this Self Portrait with Cloak painting during his famous blue period series. Like many of his other paintings from this period, this self portrait uses all blue tones and is very melancholy in nature.

The young artist presents himself as the struggling painter, unshaven, somber, mysterious, while still remaining confident. [Source: artquotes.net]

If you are feeling a bit blue and need to get your mind off of your troubles you might enjoy fiddling around with this online Picasso drawing program, called picassohead.

I have had some fun with it lately. This is my self-portrait.

MLydiaM

 Self-Portrait by Linda Pastan
       (After Adam Zagajewski)

I am child to no one, mother to a few,
wife for the long haul.
On fall days I am happy
with my dying brethren, the leaves,
but in spring my head aches
from the flowery scents.
My husband fills a room with Mozart
which I turn off, embracing
the silence as if it were an empty page
waiting for me alone to fill it.
He digs in the black earth
with his bare hands. I scrub it
from the creases of his skin, longing
for the kind of perfection
that happens in books.
My house is my only heaven.
A red dog sleeps at my feet, dreaming
of the manic wings of flushed birds.
As the road shortens ahead of me
I look over my shoulder
to where it curves back
to childhood, its white line
bisecting the real and the imagined
the way the ridgepole of the spine
divides the two parts of the body, leaving
the soft belly in the center
vulnerable to anything.
As for my country, it blunders along
as well intentioned as Eve choosing
cider and windfalls, oblivious
to the famine soon to come.
I stir pots, bury my face in books, or hold
a telephone to my ear as if its cord
were the umbilicus of the world
whose voices still whisper to me
even after they have left their bodies.

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