What is the deal with Picasso?!

This is the French painter Françoise Gilot, in her prime, when she really got going on her career. She was incredibly talented, beginning to paint at the age of five and, thanks to her father, was also well educated, attending the Sorbonne. But when she was just 21 years old, she became first a protegée and then the lover of Pablo Picasso, who was 63 at the time! I can understand being under the sway of a mentor, but...a 40-year difference? Sixty-three-year-old men look old and mostly unattractive to me, and I'm 65! (Yeah, if you're a 63-year-old man reading this, no, I don't care to know what you think of my looks, thanks.)

Anyway, back to Françoise. They stayed together for 10 years and, although they never married, she gave him two children, Claude and Paloma. After they separated, Picasso told all the art dealers he knew not to purchase her art. (Petty, petty man.) Two years after she ditched Picasso, she married another artist, Luc Simon, and had a third child, Aurelia, but their marriage only lasted seven years. Get this: Picasso convinced her to divorce Simon so she could marry Picasso and thus legally provide for the children, but he had already secretly married his model, Jacqueline Roque!

She got back at him, though, by writing the tell-all Life with Picasso, which sold more than a million copies, overcoming a lawsuit filed by him to keep it from being published. All the money she earned was used to help her children make a case to become Picasso's legal heirs. (He quit speaking to them after she wrote the book.) (Did I mention the word "petty"?)

But Françoise was not destined to be alone; seven years later, she met and married Jonas Salk! Yes, the polio vaccine guy. Their union lasted 25 years (until he died in 1995), although they spent at least half of every year apart while she traveled to paint in Paris, New York, and La Jolla, California.

During the 1980s and '90s, Gilot designed costumes, stage sets, and masks for productions at the Guggenheim in New York City. She also art-directed a scholarly journal and taught summer classes at the University of Southern California (USC).

She currently splits her time between New York and Paris (working for the Salk Institute), and continues to exhibit her work internationally. She is about to turn 100!

I set out to do one thing with this painting and ended up doing another, so it's sort of a mish-mash. I should have painted it in acrylic to achieve the style I wanted, but I just wasn't in the mood for the struggle, since I am not yet confident using acrylic, so I did it in watercolor and then tried to reproduce a few of the effects she puts into her portraits. I ended up painting a much more realistic portrait than I had planned, but with weird features like the purple around her eyes and the blue "halo" around her figure. She paints in solid swathes of color, breaking the face and figure down into simple sections, but it just didn't look right in watercolor the way I paint, so I ended up mostly blending. I think I caught her likeness pretty well anyway, though.

"Françoise Gilot"—pencil, watercolor, acrylic inks, white gesso, Posca pen, white gel pen, on 140-lb. Fluid hotpress (smooth) paper, about 8x11 inches.