Picasso's Damsels & My Lack of Distress

As I watched Antonio Banderas on the big screen,
playing a late-middle-aged Pablo Picasso,

I was drawn into the current of his passions.

His love of painting was a big focus,

but it was hard to miss the other great passion of his life:

women.

He was replete with wives and mistresses,

and it seemed somehow right that he would live by his own rules.
It seemed completely natural that a man with such talent 

would not see the world the way the rest of us are expected to.

When you are filled by
and hungry for
art,

you cannot color yourself inside the lines.

Rules are illusions –

straw barriers masquerading as concrete,

easy to brush away and pass through.

Rules are for people without the ability 

to imagine their own reality and fill a canvas with it.

Rules are absorbed subconsciously,

and silently provide structure while the artist fills in around them

with color and light,

pulled from the visions in his mind...

So, if Picasso was inspired by Dora's photography,

and settled by Francoise's steadiness,

and drawn repeatedly to Marie-Therese for her ability to please him,

despite being married to Olga,

then why shouldn't he connect with each of them,

taking into his heart, his bed, or his brush, 

the gifts they had for him?

Each love he claimed allowed him to 

expand.

I can see him with each of them,

focused on the moment,
and on the light in their eyes;

so far removed from cultural and societal norms

that he wasn't affected by the expectations of the outside world;

he would love Dora how and when he was moved to,

and he would spend peaceful days with Francoise and their daughter, Maya, 

when he was moved to do that.

He would then love another, and another,

the same as he had always done before.

He operated within his own plane of existence -

it may have looked like he lived in our world, 

but his genius built the dimension in which he resided.

He was a man living within his own rhythm;

each of the women merely joined him there for a brief time.

I don't know why I am so at ease with his unorthodox ways

(would I be so cavalier if he loved me?)

but maybe it's because I wish I had the balls to live like that -

utterly on my own terms,

and with the power 

to forge my way against the tides of society,

an Amazon Warrior birthed by Aphrodite and Shakespeare.

Reality is what we can accept, and what we decide it should be,
so in a sense, we all make our own rules, don't we?

It's just that most of us aren't as bold or creative
as the Picassos of the world,

and make only small tweaks and minor adjustments
to the template of society's rules,

rather than rewriting the whole Magna Carta in technicolor.

 

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907