Arches

Arches

Stripped to its bare essence, the elimination of just one more design element would render this bird unrecognizable. Yet even my three-year-old recognizes this as an owl. Part of the charm of this design, however, is that it makes you wonder, how? What’s the tip-off that it’s an owl? It’s “owlishness” somehow enters our subconscious without our awareness of what exactly it is that convincingly makes it an owl. Yet Picasso’s genius was that he understood this cognitive process on a conscious level and was, at will, able to bring just enough detail, but no more, to his design to conjure the desired image in our mind. This style of art could be called "Reductionism", one of the hundreds of unique styles which Picasso invented. This lovely owl follows a long line of reductionist masterworks by the artist, perhaps most famously the sculpture of 1942, Tete de Taureau (shown below), which was fabricated by the simple juxtaposition of an old bicycle seat and handlebars.  An amusing drawing from 1920 of a small bird, accomplished with a single stroke of a pencil without interruption, is pictured beside it.

Picasso kept many animals, one of which was a wounded owl that he found and nursed back to health. It served as the inspiration for several prints, as well as a number of beautiful paintings, sculptures, and drawings.