Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is a large oil painting created in 1907 by the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. The work portrays five nude female prostitutes from a brothel on Carrer d’Avinyó in Barcelona

When researching and creating options for the composition project, I decided to use the idea of the human figure and much of my life drawing as a theme. When I looked at some of my life drawings, I decided they were quite abstract and after recently enjoying using geometric shapes and lines in my drawings, I decided to tie the two together.

I had previously studied/analysed Picasso’s Les Demoiselle’s d’Avignon and recognized the geometric shapes within his forms.

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon marks a radical break from traditional composition and perspective in painting. It depicts five naked women with figures composed of flat, splintered planes and faces inspired by Iberian sculpture and African masks. The compressed space the figures inhabit appears to project forward in jagged shards; a fiercely pointed slice of melon in the still life of fruit at the bottom of the composition teeters on an impossibly upturned tabletop