‘Why I am not a Painter’ - Theatre Picasso (II)

  

“If I knew Picasso, I would buy myself a grey guitar and play.” (Counting Crows, ‘Mr Jones’)

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The first time that Picasso flashed semi-seriously across my consciousness, was when Adam Duritz, the lead-singer of Counting Crows, name-checked him in one of his songs. Ever since then, I’ve always been primed to look for, not only the grey in Picasso’s paintings, but also guitars. Perhaps this is why, on glancing at The Painter and his Model, and spotting a guitar, that I immediately sent a photograph to my younger brother Mark, who is such a fan of the song that he’s declared that if he ever bought a dog, he would name it Mr Jones.

 

Picasso, The Painter and his Model (1926)

Except, reading up on this mesmerising painting, I learned that what I’d thought was a guitar, was in fact an artist’s palette. The clue, I guess, is in the title of the painting. But, as this is modern art, I’m always wary of Frank O’Hara’s oranges and Mike Goldberg’s sardines.

 

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‘Why I Am Not a Painter’

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
“Sit down and have a drink” he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. “You have SARDINES in it.”
“Yes, it needed something there.”
“Oh.” I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”
All that’s left is just
letters, “It was too much,” Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.

 

*

There’s no guitar, but that’s what I saw. Does it matter that I also see the outline of a dove’s head? Or - this certainly wouldn’t be unusual in a Picasso painting - the outline of a cock and a pair of balls? Of course not. I’ve seen a guitar and so this will always be the Picasso painting with the grey guitar.

“Mr Jones strikes up a conversation with a black haired flamenco dancer”