Doha Abdul Raouf Al-Mall

The expressive effects in the Clown painting are based on the collapse of coherent comedy and its sad transformations, which made me investigate the reasons for the beauty of this painting and its persistence in attracting attention. In my tireless search for beauty in art, I found that some artists rely on humor that contains some glimpses of sadness, and signals of joy are almost limited to warm colors only. However, we consider it a comedic painting that holds onto the tails of details that produce comical effects based on the collapse of the character, and then its imaginative coherence. 

It takes the breath away for moments that force us into silence and standing before it searching for the secrets of its beauty and fame. It is nothing but a painting drawn according to the emotional fluctuations that an artist sometimes suffers from, so levels of movement emerge and produce characters with behavioral traits belonging socially to individuals or rational beings, oozing with comical art with simplicity and visual grace specific to a group of people, whom we call "The Clown," a name derived from commotion and expressing overwhelming emotions that affect others. 

The Clown painting formed my starting point, and made me contemplate it for hours. It almost made me turn away from it and write another article about tragedy in plastic art, except that the clown in this painting plays with the shadows of his existence perhaps, because he concerns a catery of people especially those who yearn for him in hours of distress. No matter how much the clown's profession is to elicit laughter, it contains within its depths quantities of sadness expressed by Pablo Picasso with the shadow hidden between the colors that symbolize the comedic spirit that sweeps the boundaries between the inner and outer, and signs of sadness became in many times the comedic attribute that the painting possesses, or rather it is the secret of the artistic game and its beauty evident in the lines that lie in white and its purity, and what it hides of mirth in a garment that carries the folds of the soul that is characterized by grace, lightness, and unartificial laughter, which hides the clown's character and his mirth. Everything that comes from the heart enters the heart, and everything that comes from bright and warm colors moves without permission to the sight which translates the feelings of the other and extracts laughter or a tear from him. The artist transfers his artistic sense to the painting and the brush becomes a tool for assimilating feelings, as Picasso always relied on shaking feelings through the grotesqueness of his choices for the characters he draws with art that evokes confusion in the soul, and leads to astonishment without permission, as if he extracts from the recipient his tears and grants him the warmth of laughter that is hidden behind the clown's lips in this painting which cannot be described as emotional nor as art devoid of meaning, as it focuses in the first place on astonishment. If we contemplate the secret of this painting, we find it carries the spirit of the clown, or the spirit of the comical art adapted with light, shadow, colors, and contrast based on the strength of observation and contradiction in raising questions. There is no wonder in that, for emotion is either negative or positive, and the effect is either laughable or cryable, and it may be combined as the laughably sad. Doesn't humanity carry many contradictions that it shares with human concerns and the source of his relief? 

Uniqueness of Details: 

In the painting, the uniqueness of sad details and their artistic significance is realized: bright light at the forehead combines the nose and chin in a triangle that harmonizes with the hat. Thus the colors carry us in their aesthetic thinness and artistic sweetness toward the threshold of the sculptural meaning, for a clown who makes us see through him what the artist wants us to see. The look formed in the eyes is our gateway to assimilating this clown continuing to sit quietly, as if in a state of shock that pushed him to frown in the face in most cases while wearing the remains of his clothes, and in a style not devoid of sadness in which even his hands are shrouded, which carry some "patches" of dark colors at the bottom, and light at the top as if a corner in some angle, before facing his audience with a hidden laugh or sarcasm that penetrates the veins of the colors that push the lines to as if he is wearing his worn out clothes patched with colors, to reveal a sad face that does not belong to comical art or clowning that es beyond the attribute of laughter to reveal a smiling face at the very least for a person carrying the attribute of a clown. It is as if Pablo Picasso's brush stole some of the clown's sorrows unawares, if not all his sorrows, and showed them to an audience before whom the truth of this man named "Pierrot" or Pierrot the Clown is reflected. Can the artist's brush interpret feelings and reveal the real faces characterized by comedy or tragedy, and does the artist possess the threshold of drama through his brush and colors?

A clown who fears the truth to appear, so he fears confrontation without paint on the face to change the features and turn them from sadness to joy and does not hesitate to seize his astonishment. He is the persistent one to reach his basic al which is expressing his emotions and desires in a shocking style, carrying his fingerprint and reflecting his cheerful launching spirit, revealing his opinions behind the veil of clowning or behind the veil of brush and color.

Perhaps dullness is the biggest enemy in fine art, but conversely, possessing a sense of humor needs a social intelligence with which the fine artist interprets the other, with his interests, concerns, desires, and emotion to capture him and for his brush and colors to have an impact. Therefore, there is no wonder that Pablo Picasso's brush possessed its genius and that the details of his painting inclined to a certain color of light specific to it among all other colors. What makes some people laugh may not make others laugh, and the clown possesses the sense of interpreting his reality and picking the suitable to magnify his microscope, so laughable, shocking, and striking images come out and are cool on the hearts, carrying the message of their owner with its decisive and convincing vibrations according to the skill of its sender and his long experience in movement, images, and presence reaching the heart for influence and to the mind and sight. Thus you were affected by that in an amazing effect that made the Clown painting a history for which the doors of exhibitions and museums shake for a simple painting that makes us wonder about the meaning of sadness, joy, comedy, and tragedy, and we wonder what is the philosophy of joy and comedy in this painting? Why is he sad before facing the audience or after facing them? What saddens him? And on what does the clown basically rely on making us laugh while he is the one crying from inside or in his moments of isolation? 

If we analyze the cause of laughter, we find in it a childish emotion, as the newborn baby surprises us with a smile reflecting his delight with this new universe looking upon him. Perhaps it is a smile of gratitude for a mother who knows how to achieve his sufficiency and satisfy his emerging needs required by both his physical and psychological growth. This state continues for laughter to become an inherent habit for him that concerns him among all creatures. We may laugh from the horror of the surprise. Perhaps the reason for the specificity of laughter changing between one society and another and one language and another is the expectation of the surprise related to a social law or a social value spread in one society and not existing at all in another. It may be related to a pun specific to one language over another. Some peoples' culture depends on comedy and the ability to understand it, and this ability the clown stores through his awareness of the value of sadness within him which he transforms into a colored material inclined to laughter. 

Does sadness stem from the unconscious discovered by Freud? Or else why does the child get sad when he does not understand anything he hears, and does not conscious the game of existence through faces yet? Does laughter return us to the depth of our childhood so we throw off our shoulders the worries and forget what disturbs us and disturbs our sleep? As if it is a childish characteristic planted in the soul waiting for someone to wake it from its slumber? Through it, our childhood wakes up in us, so we recover and live it again to bring joy to ourselves.

And does the smile delude us that we are happy not miserable, so our misery shatters when the misery of others shatters?

It seems that the smile has a contagious social dimension, otherwise why do directors of comedy shows resort to inserting a recording of collective laughter if laughter was not contagious? Does the artist search for himself as the clown does?

And so "Pablo Picasso" has drawn the reflections of the self on this clown specifically.

If comical art is a celebration of life, it is a celebration that focuses on the paradoxes already existing that we didn't notice, except if someone comes to bring them out to us and put them before our eyes and portray them to us within the fictional artistic concept sarcastically. Here it is necessary to touch upon the relationship between the artist and the viewer, or between the artist and the recipient, as the clown's skill is manifested in magnifying matters a convincing magnification adjusted within a convincing standard that distinguishes the artist's fingerprint. But what are the als of clowning or comical sarcasm and other things in which the artist and the clown are equal?

The artist "Pablo Picasso" consecrates his brush for the comical imagination, but within the realism of the character that plays this role, and metaphorically it is the artist himself who is hidden behind his painting or behind the character of the clown he draws according to several common points between light and color.

White and the hidden meaning of the clown's character and his colors alike, for the color construction in the painting is dominated by white, and at the same time light controls the face, meaning the painting was not simple passing, but a message directed through fine art to societies groaning under the weight of their sorrows, and from various aspects of life. How could a clown whose behaviors were characterized by comicality or comedy be dominated by tragedy or sorrows? And can a clown cause sadness to his audience or break his sorrows with the joys of others? 

Comical suspense possessed by the clown in this painting which provoked a dialectic in me and pushed me toward writing this article trying to analyze the artistic and psychological style of this painting which I consider grotesqueness in its concept, and even though it doesn't belong to surrealism, it belongs to the individual or the social human or the being attacked by feelings of joy just like feelings of sadness and capable of spreading the spirit of comedy as he spreads the spirit of tragedy keeping the standards and measures and aesthetic ratios which are like an aesthetic scale that added to the painting an artistic glow or a legacy that still raises many dialectics especially regarding the matching between light and white color despite the sensitivity of the color that carries in its folds the sum of all colors and absorbs the negatives of the sight to keep the proportion of the rest of the colors that symbolize the comical art that the clown's character is characterized with.