Why Great Artists Paint the Same Thing Their Whole Lives
Claude Monet painted water lilies over 250 times. Not versions of a theme — the same pond, from roughly the same spot, for nearly three decades. Pablo Picasso painted women his entire life, across every style he ever worked in, from the sharp geometry of Cubism to the loose, urgent brushwork of his final years. Lucian Freud painted his own face again and again for over sixty years, watching himself age in real time on canvas. None of them ran out of ideas. If anything, the opposite happened....