I am dark.

I am light.

I am an artist. My brush is my language and my Art the words. Why do I paint like this? What makes me different? What makes me Picasso and not Braques or Cezanne or Modigliani?

I am a caveman. I paint what I see in my dreams. I try to explain what I have seen to the frightened, huddled others in this dark cave with me. This is our home. This wall is my shared dream. The smoke from this sweet wet wood makes me see things. My waking dreams move flickering on the walls in front of me. I live in the caves in Lascaux and I live in Altimira and in the Drakensberg. I live all over the world and my images are the same; the dots and lines and shapes are the same. I paint what I see in my dreams. Are my dreams the real me? Is my body the dream?

I am a mask. I hide the artist who made me. I change the artist from an ordinary man into a dream. I do not look like the person I am hiding. I look like the thing the person is hiding from, because he can not scare the shadows away without me. I am bigger than you. I cover you. I am your mask. I am your fire-lit, chanting, stamping ritual, your dance, a waking dream, but I am no longer bound by a cave. The dream can be with you; my face can reveal your dream. I am the dream. I tell a story. I think. I entertain.

The craftsman makes things for others to use. He does this because it is a good thing to do. He fought to do this instead of hunting. He argued to do this instead of gathering. He argued with the strongest until they broke and saw the value in him. He can bring interesting ideas to people, because people talk about what he does. He creates concepts. He is an artist.

I am a classically trained artist. I look at the world with a measured eye. I don’t see people I see shape and shadow with intention and movement. I look so closely not even a speck in your eye escapes me. You don’t like me. You don’t like me looking so closely at you. You don’t want to be told the truth about yourself. I am upset with you; I don’t like what I see. There is something wrong with this picture - the shapes are correct and the colour is well mixed and the Damar varnish perfectly applied but it is not you. I want to tell the world about you. They must know who you are, not what you are. I begin to undraw you.

I am tone. I serve only the rods of the eyes. I am black and white, shadow and light, nothing more. I carry light like water from the canvas to your brain, pitching my gourds of energy into the river of your nervous system.

I am colour. I am light’s secret affair. You do not need me but you love me. I make what you see worth looking at. I tell a story with no words. I am pure emotion.

I am A Picasso. I am light and dark. I am my dreams. I am the little thing at the center of me. I am the shortest distance between two ideas. I am tone and colour. I am a person but I am a line. How can a line be a person? When is a woman not a female? Why do I recognise the personality of a line?

I am Picasso. I think about what I see but I don’t think with my eyes. My eyes are just another tool in my paintbox. There is something very strange going on. It doesn’t make sense. There was a time when I painted people so beautifully; I thought painting portraits was all I ever wanted to do. Something changed in me; something emptied out and left nothing, like a Zen Buddhist reaching Enlightenment - that Divine Nothing of the soul. I once saw the world as people and jobs and places to go and things to see; now I am confused by what I see. None of this should exist, but I can paint it. I can draw a line around your face and it will remind me of you. Why? Who are you? A dog doesn’t see a painting. A dog doesn’t recognise its master in a few lines. It’s true, I’ve tried. Cats and horses are not fooled by a line. Why me? Why you?
I have been thinking about what I know the world to be. Why do I see a guitar and not a box with lines? I can paint any box with lines and people will see a guitar. How many lines do I need?
I can paint a guitar from many sides at once and you can understand it the same as any real guitar, though a perfect picture of a guitar does not play music. This intrigues me because I have seen this thinking before but not here in the dilution and pollution of Paris.
All children are artists. My father is a well respected art teacher. He taught me to paint realistically, perhaps he felt a need to pass on what he had learned to his son, his creation. It is 1898 and I am 17 years old and I can paint as well as any art master. I have surpassed my father and now he wears a mask of pride. We spent time in the countryside at Lascaux and I was intrigued by the cave paintings. A simple day trip with my father to something we have seen often before, but this time something switched in me. My father hinted in passing that the marks on the walls are the root of my ability and understanding of the world. Perhaps one of my ancestors made the marks on those cave walls and said, “That is a Bison” and someone believed. Who is the real artist - the one who paints or the one who believes what he sees? Maybe it’s all one big con and like the little boy in the Emperor’s New Clothes I look at the paintings around me and say, “There’s nothing there.”
My mother believed in me. That is all I ever needed. She always said, “Pablo, if you are a soldier you will become a general, if you are a monk you will become the Pope.” Instead I was a painter and I became Picasso.
I went to Spain and found the same lines and dots in images at Altimira. Is the way we see fundamental to who we are? Are these same images being painted right now in the dust of Africa? Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
If I am just my brain I would not need to know what a guitar is and a line wouldn’t remind me of you. If I am just my body then what use is there for my lines? How many lines of paint do I need to satisfy you? One Thousand? One Hundred? One? None? Could I paint nothing and it would remind me of you?

I am a woman. Picasso is a kind man in person, but treats me strangely on canvas. Sometimes he is passionate and sometimes analytical, gracefully violent. He pushes me and tests me as a model. Does he even see me or am I just something to analyse and break apart? Maybe I am just a convention, a distraction, so that he feels like a real artist. You may not recognise me but I do have a name, Dora Maar. Picasso calls me his ‘muse’. He distorts me. He says when you love a woman you don’t start measuring her limbs. He says I am his African Dream. Ha, my East European features and French mannerisms are so far removed from that continent. Strange, I don’t know why he said that. Just something he mentioned while standing, arms folded, thinking aloud in front of his blank canvas.
Picasso paints me in so many different styles, but each one of the thousands of paintings and drawings of me is Picasso. Sometimes he is so graceful, sometimes so destructive. He says every act of creation is first an act of destruction.
Does my body mean anything to him other than a set of lines? Is he trying to understand me or is he trying to understand how he sees me? Is he trying to destroy me in his mind?
Maybe he is a fake. A Con Artist. Maybe he gets me to pose nude for him to satisfy his male pleasure while he makes page after page of almost random lines and pretends to be a real artist. But I know Picasso is not a boy. I know what genius is. I am also an artist and a photographer and I have some idea what he is doing with those lines.
The brush is a language and the lines are the words. Picasso is trying to tell me something. Something that has no clear meaning in our primitive European language. He is painting a mask, and he sees it from inside. Perhaps an African language could illustrate his lines with more meaning. Perhaps an African way of seeing could paint the world as we once did, before we learned not to see what we feel. Our origins are long forgotten and buried in the chambers of museums, we are almost embarrassed by them. We find so many reasons to deny their existence, we paint over them in millions of creative ways but the original lines and shapes of our ancient past are still there. Still here.
I love him only, even if he is not Picasso. After Picasso only God.
Picasso has a tireless pursuit. He creates thousands of canvasses, sometimes 50 in a day. “Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone,” he says. In February he painted a portrait of me with his eyes closed, he was singing as he painted. Did I really need to be there? But how could I not be there to witness that? Picasso seeing me without looking, singing as if I wasn’t there. A bird in the big safe cage of his studio.

I am an African from a small and forgotten country. When I heard the French Embassy would bring Picasso to my far-away and forgotten country I was both overjoyed and saddened. I felt like a Picasso drawing, out of shape, opened up. Has Picasso stolen my culture for his own commercial gain? Why is it that a man can intrigue me even after he is long dead? Who was this foreigner who knew my culture but never visited my country until now, and who visits in the form of lines and paint? I will never meet Picasso, but I can know him through what he did. You see, I am like Picasso too; my ideas will live on after I have died. Every day I make lines and they mean something. I put ideas into the world every time I touch something or say something. Maybe in the next life I will recognise something of myself, something that I did today. Maybe the lines Picasso and I have created are the same lines. Maybe I am Picasso.
All children are artists. Some people forget this and grow away from themselves. They call this adulthood. Some people grow and grow so far from themselves over generations they forget where they once were. Maybe Picasso is remembering something. Maybe Picasso is bringing us back home. Bringing us together. I go to see Picasso at the museum. His lines are not unique, every child knows how to paint them, though some people have forgotten that the child never disappears, it just gets pushed back, held back, told to shut up and sit down and be quiet.
I recognise what Picasso is doing right away, I recognise his work because I see it every day. On the side of the road I see Picasso. At every flea market, at every roadside stall in the country. My sister carves masks better than any man and sells them for R10 to a company in Magaliesberg. They sell them for R200. Picasso drew a few lines on paper and it sold for millions. Why? What has Picasso seen that every craftsman on this side of the road has not seen? I want to learn how to do that. I am always doing what I cannot do so that I may learn how to do it. I’d like to live as a poor man with lots of money.

I am Picasso. I want to find that one way of seeing you that everyone will know and understand. Why do people like some lines and not others? The secret is in the Art of Africa. If I study the progress of Art in Africa I will study the very nature of human perception. It is like looking into the Eye of God, daring Him to blink first.
The cave paintings in Africa are almost still wet and fresh, they are more like my paintings than any other. They sit on walls and people look at them and some imagine and some recognise but most walk out and ignore. Our caves are neatly square and painted and air-conditioned but you can’t hide a cave. We are yearning for our days in the cave. We take our caves with us. We don’t need caves, we could sleep in big fields under the stars and have wide space around us... but where would we hang the Picasso?
Some people look at Africa and say, “They are behind the rest of the world.” I disagree. I think progress is measured by how far you have walked from Paradise. How far have we come? How long is the line at the gates of Paradise, and are we waiting to get in or waiting to get out? What do you look like when you are dead and before you are born? Do the images we create before we know a language reveal something we can only know without language?

I am a Caveman. I designed and built my own cave and I decorated it with lines and shapes that please me - I bought the lines and shapes through a catalogue delivered to me via a computer-generated mailing list. Picasso said computers are useless, they can only give you answers.
I have questions for Picasso. I don’t dream waking dreams any more. The unknown no longer frightens me. People frighten me. I live alone in my cave with my take-away menus and my take-away art. My Picasso print, Limited Edition 156/475 unsigned. My Jazz CDs - a plastic print of the musical Picasso.
I try to understand the world. I watch the flickering images on my 72cm digital LCD TV and look out the window to Africa to find answers. I wonder how a line can remind me of you, Picasso. It shouldn’t be possible, but it is.

I am Picasso. I am Africa. I am the shortest line between two ideas. I am the Eye of God and I am looking right at you right now.