“Inspiration exists but it has to find you working.”
This quote from Pablo Picasso is much more than a genius phrase. His absolutely enormous production even has an entry in the Guiness Book of World Records. Between paintings, engravings, lithographs, sculptures, ceramics, drawings, literary texts and photographs, experts estimate there are more than 45.000 pieces from this artist.
Picasso was born near the Mediterranean and always felt compelled to return to this landscape again and again, physically and in his art. His iconic striped t-shirt was a form of remembering his vital link to the sea. It’s the same t-shirt that Coco Chanel, who he shared many projects with, converted into a symbol pf liberty and rebellion. Through them, a long list of artists and celebrities have worn the striped shirt, further cementing the myth. Andy Warhol, Jean Seberg, Audrey Hepburn, Jean Paul Gaultier and Kurt Cobain are some of the names that frequent the popular stereotype of the striped shirt.
Picasso was a genius in many regards, and in one of them specifically he comes close to the original definition in the dictionary: a fantastic being, that can adopt any form and mentally and spiritually influence human beings. This type of genius is how all of the women who shared a life ith Picasso should be known, his muses who were immortalized and sacrificed at the same time.
Like the sea, whose force is life and death, is how Picasso was with his muses. All of the women who stayed trapped under the influence of the artist suffered the same tragic fate: they emptied their souls and he captured their portrait.
“Every child is an artist.
The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.”
“When I was a child, my mother told me, ‘If you become a soldier, you’ll be a general. If you become a monk, you’ll be the Pope.’
Despite the awareness of growing old, this man from Malaga recognized in his maturity that learning to paint as a child had taken him his entire life.
This idea, in the mind of someone whose life was an intense search for a new language, strikes us as so revealing that we didn’t hesitate to decide on a design inspired by him. This is how Stripes emerged, one of the first designs that our Artists Quotes Collection includes.
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