Picasso's Little Junior. Part 1 (3 Parts)

Text by Ian Webb  

  In mentioning almost any piece done by Pablo Picasso, most minds conjure up faces with crooked eyes, more than two eyes, upside down noses and objects with more than one side facing the viewer.   

  With multiple angles and multiple dimensions, Picasso's art has inspired me personally since I was 4 years old, and in my teenage years I felt even further mystified. Along with the greats of the early 20th century, I had a real love for realism, surrealism, cubism, expressionism and early modernism.  

   I had to remind myself over and over again, that all old art was once new. While I appreciated newer artists on the scene, being a young artist, I kept silently saying: "Nobody is as good as these old masters...these amazingly talented artists who broke the molds of the early 20th century.”  However, this next artist I will talk about, certainly broke my inner sayings.   

  My name is Ian Webb, and I am a painter, art lover, fan of surrealism, and I have Bipolar Disorder. While I have Bipolar 2, with almost no mania at all, I don't let my depression take me away from my family or my creative gifts. However, for several years, during my early 20's, I did.

  But once I was able to get back to functioning in society and begin painting again, I never looked back.     

  It wasn't until I was 17 and catatonically depressed that I was diagnosed with this. And I had first learned of Alexandra Nechita, the "Pint-Sized Picasso,'' from my art teacher in high school, at the age of 15.   

  Like I said, my all-time favorite painters and paintings were at least 50 years before my time. But when my art teacher brought in an artbook about the life and work of Alexandra, an only 10-year-old girl prodigy, I was blown away wrong! And GLAD too!