Picasso And The ‘Work’ Of Art

Photo Credit: All photos taken by @theomzproject at the Picasso Museum in Barcelona, Spain

It’s rare that our work appears in its full and complete form at the outset. It’s rare that we have all of our ideas, our concepts, all of our flourishes fully figured out at the start. 

More often, it develops over time, through our continued work and effort. Each stage of development either reinforces our core idea and/or allows us to discard those elements that don’t fit. 

I observed this recently at the Picasso Museum in Barcelona, where you can walk through and understand how his art evolved over the years. And in one section, you could see the evolution of his art on one specific piece (as seen in the photos throughout this post). 

But of course, those who see Picasso’s finished art rarely appreciate or understand the effort that went into each one. 

All they see is the end output. They don’t see the iterations, the difficulties or the frustrations. 

But those are real steps along the journey to get to where we want to go - steps that we have a tendency of forgetting are actually required and necessary. 

Genius rarely happens out of nothing. It demands more than its share of work.