A Picasso painting, “Woman in Blue Hat (Dora Maar),” dated October 30, 1939, was stolen from the Picasso show at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco last week. And has now been located in the home of a seedy ex-professor, who currently styles himself as a science-fiction writer!!!

“Stolen Picasso”, 18″ x 24″ inches, July, 2011, Oil on canvas.” Click for larger version.

Software theft that is. I liked this painting so much when I saw it at the show that I found an image of it on the web and copied it as a kind of homage. And to learn a little more about how Picasso did it. The more I worked on the painting, the more little things I saw. I missed quite a few tricks, but by now I’m happy enough with how it looks, and I can stop. In some way it’s become my own. Stolen.

As always, you can get more info about my paintings at my Paintings page.

I do like the way Picasso has the mouth pushing out more, and the irises on the eyes, and the interesting shading around the nose. He makes the thing look more like a real face. I wasn’t actually working from the image shown here, I was making do with a lower-res image that I’d found and printed earlier. I kind of like the SFictional notion of someone building a clone of a person based on a very poor online image of them…

I found this image of the original on an article in the Seattle zine The Stranger when this show was in Seattle in 2010. (Our old friend Bethany Jean Clement works at the The Stranger, by the way, so hi, Bethany, in case you go Google-trolling for your name some time and encounter this post.)

While I was at it I prepared my next canvas by painting it gray with the mixed-together left-over paint from “Stolen Picasso.” I figure if I have the dark background I can make some lighter things pop hard from the picture plane.

Setting the canvas on an easel to dry a bit in the afternoon sun, and a spontaneous bit of process art emerged: a nice shadow of our phone/cable lines on the cloudy canvas.

It’s all art, isn’t it—even a vagrant neon reflection on a bit of glass.

Or three verticals arranged just so in an empty alley, welcoming the manhole cover.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 21st, 2011 at 8:28 pm and is filed under Rudy's Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.