Picasso’s sixth sense & process of creativity
“You have to start drawing before you know what you’re going to draw.”
Painter Chuck Close famously sneered, “Inspiration is for amateurs – the rest of us just show up and go to work.” In her counsel to prospective writers, novelist Isabelle Allende repeated the mantra, “Show up, show up, show up,” adding, “And after a time the muse shows up, too.” A famous composer once said, “A self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretence that he is not in the mood,” in a letter to his benefactress from 1878. In fact, countless creative luminaries have articulated this idea throughout the ages, along with the parallel inquiry of where ideas come from, that creativity and fruitful ideas do not come from the passive resignation to a muse but rather from the active application of work ethic — or discipline, something the late and great Massimo Vignelli advocated for as the engine of creative work.
The best and most eloquent articulation, though, comes from one of history’s greatest artists, which is maybe not surprising. It can be observed through Picasso’s sixth sense & process of creativity.
This was one of the inquiries that Pablo Picasso (October 25, 1881–April 8, 1973) was asked by renowned Hungarian photographer Brassa over the course of their 30-year interview series, which was collected in Conversations with Picasso, the excellent 1964 book that gave us Picasso’s advice on success and why you should never compromise creatively.
Picasso answers Brassa’s question on whether the painter’s ideas come to him “by coincidence or by plan” with some sly insight on the power of “creative block”:
“I don’t know what to do. Ideas are only foundations. Rarely can I write them down as they come to me. Others gather in my pen as soon as I get to work. You must start drawing before you can decide what to draw. That is constantly running through my mind whenever I am staring at a blank page. I’m more interested in what I catch against myself than in my own concepts.”
Picasso provides an illustrative example to further support the idea that the best creative work occurs when the rational, self-editing mind gives way to the instinctive urge, which Ray Bradbury so masterfully expressed in a 1974 interview. Although he was both a professional and a personal friend of Matisse, he accuses the painter of betraying the idea that an artist should respect his or her original creative intuition by employing a highly systematic creative process.
After drawing anything, Matisse duplicates it. Five times, ten times, he copies it again, each time with neater lines. He is convinced that the last one, which is the sparest, is the best, the purest, and the final one, even though this is not always the case. Nothing is greater than the initial sketch when it comes to drawing.
