Picasso’s Ghost Can’t Compete with a Weeping Woman, by Ali Waldrop

Weeping Woman, by Pablo Picasso (Spain) 1937

Picasso’s Ghost Can’t Compete with a Weeping Woman

Picasso wrote Berkley’s philosophy on the outside of his thumb, and pressed it into the brushes he used to paint. “To be is to be perceived,” every unrealistic and geometric stroke proclaimed. He was an unbound perceiver diving further into the insecurity I too carried. He told his Weeping Woman to wail at the construct of society, and his Old Guitarist to sag his head at the melodies men forced him to write. It wasn’t until Le Rêve sat back and sighed that I was confronted by the anger of Dora Maar. Her ghost flew around the mirror and almost faded into the sky. She cursed the man that imprisoned her in abstraction. "All his portraits are lies!" Her face couldn’t find a direction and her fingers might have been carrots for the birds. 

“I was far more beautiful than this.” her Self Portrait at the Window cried. 

Picasso kidnapped her face turning her into his obscure muse, but she has led me to the lens of her own camera. Where she has started the cycle all over again. 

Ali Waldrop
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Ali Waldrop is a senior college student who specializes in story-telling photography. When she isn't plucking away at her bass or capturing the lives of her fellow students on film, she is using her creative writing skills to express the emotional arguments she often keeps tucked away.

Self Portrait at the Windo, photography by Dora Maar (France) 1935