Picasso at the Crossroads
I’m Dan Piraro, the creator of the Bizarro newspaper comic. Each week, I post my Sunday Bizarro comic, a short essay, and then the past week’s Monday-Saturday Bizarro comics written and drawn by my partner Wayno, whose weekly blog post I highly recommend.
And here’s this week’s ANSWER KEY to my Sunday comic’s Secret Symbols.
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いらっしゃいませ, Jazz Pickles and Nudists! (That’s “welcome” in Japanese, according to Google Translate.)
Today’s Sunday comic and title panel were influenced by two famous artists. The title image at the top was inspired by the art of M.C. Escher. I’ve always adored his work and it was as close to hallucinogens as I got in high school. I still love both his vision and his drafting skills and have done a handful of cartoons based on his work.
Here’s one featuring both him and Picasso, here is perhaps my favorite Escher-inspired cartoon, and here is a super fun one the idea for which came from my good buddy and colleague, Dan McConnell.
The title of this post, “Picasso at the Crossroads,” comes from a myth about the great Mississippi blues musician, Robert Johnson, who is said to have received his tremendous talents from a meeting at the crossroads at midnight with the Devil. The story goes that before 1936, he sang and played poorly, but suddenly became masterful at both that year, and so must have sold his soul to the Devil in a Faustian exchange for blues immortality.
Picasso’s story is almost the opposite, though he still achieved a kind of immortality. He was born with such a tremendous gift for art that he was painting like an adult master by the time he was a teen. As an adult, he abandoned classical composition and techniques and spent the rest of his life trying to return to a more rudimentary, instinctive, childlike quality in his art. In doing so, he changed the path and profile of fine art irrevocably. People have sometimes said of abstract art, “A child could do that.” Yes, and that was the point.
Both artist’s visions were of alternative worlds, or at least alternative ways of looking at our world—similar to the effects of hallucinogens. Did Picasso or Escher use drugs to achieve these images? Yes and no.
Picasso was known to smoke opium and hashish with friends a couple of times per week and seems to have admitted some of his ideas came from that practice. Escher, on the other hand, was more of a nerdy square who preferred to call himself a mathematician rather than an artist. He is reported to have said he did not use drugs because “my dreams are frightening enough.”
As a teen creating surrealist art, I was often accused by other kids of being a “druggy,” and once, an art therapy psychologist confidently surmised the same thing. They were very wrong. Due to the terrifying (and wholly inaccurate) anti-drug propaganda films I’d been shown in elementary school, I was terrified of recreational drugs until much later in life. I’m not putting myself anywhere near the category of Escher or Picasso, I’m only making the point that people don’t need drugs to be creative. But hallucinogens can certainly be used for inspiration.
As a special treat, (I hope!), here’s a video of me playing and singing the song I wrote for the cartoon above.
This is the sort of silliness one can find on the regular with a subscription to The Naked Cartoonist, my members-only newsletter. Just sayin.’
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Let’s see if we can determine if Wayno got his inspiration for this week’s Bizarro cartoons from another dimension…
He does an amazing impression of the magician, Teller, however.
Just put your hat back on and stand quietly by the plastic flamingo and the cement deer.
Maybe your next invention will hide the bald spot that that light accentuates.
And be sure he can affect a good Mussolini pouty face.
I’m all out of tildes. Will an umlaut do?
Perhaps Picasso could have warned him about going to church high.
That wraps up our comic acid-trip facsimile for this week. If you like that we offer these posts for free, please consider helping us continue to do so via one or more of the links below. We’ll dance and clap in gratitude like chimps on a sugar high.
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