Worried and Worrying

I share – I know – Picasso's “worried and worrying” look; mine, inherited from my father; his (Picasso's) I don't know, it may just have been his from childhood or developed later as a result of a precarious lifestyle, but that this look was habitually his has been testified to by friends who knew him; and so I imagine too the charge of being worried was levelled at him when he wasn't at all, or that he was always responded to as if he was. Yes; the “worried and worrying” look is – whether true or not – both a curse and a benefit, but it perhaps suggests – if nothing else – a determined struggle: a rock pushed up and rolled down, and pushed up again, the same hill; and a struggle too against the medium which has been chosen to represent it: stone, wood, clay, plaster, water-colour, oil, photography, verse, prose, music, dance etc. Dry, factual; straight. Lyrical, poetical; fiction. What is seen by or impressed upon the mind. The struggle free and flowing, or arduous and prickly, but always accompanied by the same “worried and worrying” look. The face etched, creased, with worry lines; its expression strained, perhaps struggling against the other range of emotions it wants to express; the light withheld a little in the eyes, in the shape of the lips; and though a description of that person's nature is supplied, which suggests they were less worried than they appeared, still that look becomes their most mentioned characteristic, for the face, perhaps it is thought – like the eyes, reveals the soul.

Written March 2022.

Picture credit: Portrait of Pablo Picasso, 1956, Marevna (Marie Vorobieff). (Source: WikiArt).