Picasso: Peace and Freedom

The other day me and my group for this project (me, Kris and Jord) went to the exhibition: 'Picasso: Peace and Freedom' at Tate Liverpool. For me the highlight was definitely the lino cuts, I love the way that Picasso uses a simple style that is instantly recognisable as his own; also as someone who is obsessed with print they gave me a lot of ideas and showed me how versatile block printing can be.

I also really liked a piece called: 'The Charnel House' (1944-1945). It is one of Picasso's most political pieces (its was after all painted in the same year that he joined the 'French Communist Party'). It is based on a documentary that Picasso saw about a Spanish family murdered in their kitchen. What I like about the painting is the way that Picasso communicates this in a way that is abstract enough to make a political statement and to show his views but also clearly represents the events that inspired the piece.

We all really liked this piece and for a while we considered making this the focal point of our project, but we eventually decided on this piece:

We chose it because we liked the way that it very simply represented the complicated struggle against war and piece which we felt the whole exhibition had been about. We also felt that the piece was simple enough that it could be open to all sorts of different interpretations.

To finnish this post, here are two more pieces that we also really liked and that communicate Picasso's views about war, peace and equality perfectly:

Helena Bochorakova-Dittrichova (1894-1980)

On the subject of woodcuts, Helena Bochorakova-Dittrichova (1894-1980) is another artist to use the medium that I have become interested in. The following examples are from a woodcut novel that she produced (apparantly she was highly influenced by Frans Masereel) called "Childhood", a story about the life of children in the Czech Republican countryside. I think that her work has a wonderful warmth and an innocence about it, which is not often seen in the woodcut medium (it is often used to convey darker subject matter).

Isabelle Vandenabeele

Isabelle Vandenabeele has been one of my favourite illustrators for a while now; I love the timeless quality of her illustrations which mix traditional woodcuts with modern digital techniques to create work that is unique and instantly recognisable. The following examples are from the book: "Rouge Rouge Petit Chaperon Rouge", her take on 'Red Riding Hood':