image essay #13

Picasso’s “The Old Guitarist” is an excellent example of mood and color. During Picasso’s blue period, Picasso used blue as the main color for all of his art work. He used blue because he was in a sad point of his life, and he was trying to portray this through his art work, by making the large extent of them shapes of blue. Not only is this piece an excellent example of mood through color, but it also allows your eye to move through the painting by the way he positioned the man and the guitar on the canvas. The man seems to be too large for the canvas; therefore he has to bend over, giving the viewer a sense of claustrophobia and confinement. It looks as if the man is hardly playing the guitar as if he is about to give up. Picasso could be trying to portray an idea of incompleteness like this musician never fully reached his dream, or the idea of a “starving artist” via music as an art form over paint or what such. I like the way he also did the lighting. The right side of the painting is mainly darker, or in the shadow, to further portray that feeling of loneliness or failure.