by Shelli Rae Spotts
Picasso once said, “Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.” This way of looking at the world, of examining it not by its shape and form but by its hue and its shade intrigues, almost as much as Picasso’s full name, which reads; Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de Los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Martyr Patricio Clito Ruíz y Picasso, for what parents could look at the tiny wrinkled face of a newborn in the early morning light and bestow on him such a monstrosity?
When contemplating color you might dig around a bit for images and come up with a host of jaundiced representations of the rising sun, among them the tips of a jonquil, or a narcissus, commonly called the daffodil, the bright egg custard yellow just creeping from between the cylindrical green leaves, or for that matter egg custard and egg tarts, frittatas and rice puddings, eggs scrambled, poached, boiled, or fried, sunny side down or sunny side up, the semi congealed yolk surrounded by an eggy white aureolas, similar to the aureolas that surrounds the heads of the Madonna and Child, translucent and transcendent and encircled by light. And Picasso painting studies of the Holy Mother and Holy Child, called his Madonnas, predominantly during his blue period, and looking at the canvas that is all you see, the color blue in all of its varieties and hues, from azure to robin’s egg to cerulean, except for hands and faces and feet which peek out of their azure robes, a blush of sun kissed flesh, roseate against a backdrop of sea watery shades, like the sun floating high in a bright cloudless sky.
Shelli Rae Spotts will earn her MFA in creative writing this April. When she is not teaching, grading papers, or attempting to write her thesis, she can usually be found sewing costumes, cooking dinner, or attending the theater with her husband and four delightfully geeky children. She is an unrepentant Anglophile and loves musicals, sci-fi movies, and chocolate in any form (the darker the better).