An Interview with Pearl Lam and Sydney Picasso
In episode six of The Pearl Lam Podcast, Pearl Lam, the renowned gallerist and podcaster, meets Sydney Picasso for an in-depth and personal conversation. In the episode, Sydney Picasso, who is the daughter-in-law of the infamous artist Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), reveals all about her famous relative.
As well as being the daughter-in-law of the celebrated artist, Pablo Picasso, Sydney is an artistic expert in her own right. In this episode, Pearl Lam (林明珠), of The Pearl Lam Podcast speaks to Sydney Picasso, who is a writer of modern and contemporary art, archaeology and style.
The Pearl Lam Podcast poses an interesting question to its viewers: is artistic talent learned or inherited? Taking a Pablo Picasso as a case study, Pearl Lam (林明珠) and Sydney Picasso uses the episode to discuss Pablo Picasso’s talent during his early years.
In this episode of The Pearl Lam Podcast, Pearl Lam and Sydney Picasso discuss how Pablo Picasso’s early years influenced his later work. Sydney reveals many intimate facts about Pablo. These facts all point towards Pablo Picasso being a child prodigy.
However, Pearl Lam (林明珠) and Sydney Picasso make the point that talent must be nurtured in order to grow. It is up to the reader therefore, to decide whether Picasso’s talent was learned or inherited.
Interestingly, Picasso’s father had also been an artist. Perhaps that is why he was Described by many as a child prodigy. It was perhaps because of his father, then, that his passion and talent for drawing was evident from an early age. According to his mother, one of Picasso’s first words was “lápiz”, the Spanish word for “pencil.”
The romance behind Pablo Picasso’s first word is hard to ignore. It seems fitting that a young Picasso was mesmerised by art from an early age. However, can the romance behind his first word simply be explained as a child copying words said by his father? This is a subject which certainly requires much thought.
In the episode, Sydney remarked to Pearl Lam that Picasso was “drawing when he was a baby, he was following his father’s example.”
When asked about Pablo Picasso, Sydney told Pearl Lam that “Picasso did a lot of things that we only discovered after he died. We found volumes of writing, both in sketchbooks and manuscripts. He was obsessed with writing, and some of it is truly amazing.”
It is evident then, that Picasso was a talented, all-round creative individual. His talents are remembered in art, yet his mind was clearly brilliant at both sketching and writing, as well as numerous other occupations. Sydney named photography and sculpture as some more of the artists’ great endeavours.
According to Sydney, one of Picasso’s famous statements was “I don’t search, I find. I don’t look, I see.” Sydney informed Pearl Lam that “the eye is so leading in what Picasso does. He doesn’t think.”
As an author, Sydney has been working on an interesting biography of Picasso, called As if I were a Signature. Sydney tells Pearl Lam that the title takes inspiration from Picasso’s photography. In some photos, Picasso would stand in the bottom right-hand corner and ask the photographer to capture him there. Make me look “as if I were a signature”, Picasso would say.
Written by: The Producer, The Pearl Lam Podcast
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