My father and mother took their children to Pablo Picasso paintings during the 60s. My father inspected one drawing and said that I was as skilled as the Spaniard. My grammar school war paintings had won honorary mention at the diocesan art show in 1964. Picasso at that age was studying figure drawing and oil painting with his father, who believed in traditional forms of art and his son honored his father by painting, as if he were a child.
Most of those childhood paintings were lost during the Civil War, but when I moved to Europe in 2011 I decided to hunt the lost collection of childhood Picasso. They had to be worth millions. I had no luck, but a New Jersey man wandered into a San Francisco gallery and clipped a drawing off the wall. The police caught the thief thanks to a video camera.
The 1965 drawing titled “Tete de Femme” looks like it could have been done by a child on LSD, then again that was Picasso’s gift. To be a man yet a child.
His baby finger-paintings have to be somewhere and somewhere was a place I usually find myself if I’m not careful.