The model for this was Jean Cocteau - Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau to give him his full name, and perhaps not surprising that a man with so many names should also have quite so many talents: one for each.
As a writer he is best known for "Les Enfants Terribles", but he was also a designer, a playwright, an artist, and a filmmaker - "Blood of a Poet", "Les Parents Terribles", "Beauty and the Beast" and "Orpheus".
My fantasy is of turning up at his Paris apartment one evening, uninvited obviously, needing some feeble excuse like I must have written down the wrong address for the person I was really visiting, and then apologise, but ask if I can use the washroom; and then get a moment inside to see who his visitors were that evening. Picasso more than likely, but the actor Yul Brynner was a regular, as was Marlene Dietrich, Coco Chanel, Erik Satie, Igor Stravinsky, Édith Piaf, Colette, Genet...
I had several versions of this portrait at one time, each one a variant of the other fantasy, that I could somehow capture the entirety of his enigmatic prolificity and genius in a single, unified painting; with solid blocks of colour like here, and washes, and crayon lines, and even one made with an actual, physical paintbrush, and acrylics from a tube.
In this version I was also trying to imitate a style, but I can't now remember which – Max Jacob possibly; something of the era of Picasso anyway. To pay full and proper tribute, all the images would really need to be filmed anyway.
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