Have you found that your style of painting has changed over time? That is quite normal and will automatically happen as you explore and experiment with various mediums and subject matter, different techniques, etc. over time. I don’t think there is anyone who looks back to their original work and it looks like what they are currently doing today. Elements, of course, will always perhaps be the same but exploration is how we learn and grow.
Some facts about Pablo Picasso (from Encyclopedia.com 2014).
The years between 1901 and 1904 were known as Picasso’s Blue Period, during which nearly all of his works were executed in somber shades of blue and contained lean, dejected, and introspective figures. The pervasive tone of the pictures is one of depression; their color is symbolic of the artist’s personal hardship during the first years of the century—years when he occasionally burned his own drawings to keep warm—and also of the suffering which he witnessed in his society. Two outstanding examples of this period are the Old Guitarist (1903) and Life (1903).
In the second half of 1904 Picasso’s style exhibited a new direction. For about a year he worked on a series of pictures featuring harlequins, acrobats, and other circus performers. The most celebrated example is the Family of Saltimbanques (1905). Feeling, as well as subject matter, has shifted here. The brooding depression of the Blue Period has given way to a quiet and unoppressive melancholy, and the color has become more natural, delicate, and tender in its range, with a prevalence of reddish and pink tones. Thus this period was called his Pink Period.
In terms of space, Picasso’s work between 1900 and 1905 was generally flat, emphasizing the two-dimensional character of the painting surface. Late in 1905, however, he became increasingly interested in pictorial volume. This interest seems to have been stimulated by the late paintings of Cézanne, ten of which were shown in the 1905 Salon d’Automne. In Picasso’s Boy Leading a Horse (1905) and Woman with Loaves (1906) the figures are vigorously modeled, giving a strong impression of their weight and three-dimensionality. The same interest pervades the famous Portrait of Gertrude Stein (1906), particularly in the massive body of the figure. But the face of the sitter reveals still another new interest: its mask-like abstraction was inspired by Iberian sculpture, an exhibition of which Picasso had seen at the Louvre in the spring of 1906. This influence reached its fullest expression a year later in one of the most revolutionary pictures of Picasso’s entire career, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907).
Fun Fact: Pablo Picasso loved animals. He had a pet monkey, an owl, a goat, a turtle and packs of dogs and cats.