Bouquet’s Le repas de Pierrot, Pierrot’s Dinner, suggests a picnic. The scene depicts the actor Jean-Gaspard Deburau as Pierrot, a star stock character in the Théâtre des Funambules (Theater of the Tightrope Walkers). Pierrot always losses. From the look...
It’s unpicnicky. A Mad Tea-Party is agitated and foreboding, perhaps suggesting Fitzgerald’s unfulfilled (unrealistic) desire to become a ballet dancer. Despite the allusion to Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, this tea party is without humor. If Fitzgerald is Alice,...
Strange figures and vibrant colors make this picnic unsettling. The setting appears to be a sailboat in which a puffin sits beside a bare-breasted woman with a face like a mask. There is a dog in her lap and a striped tabby at her knee. Above the funnel (lower right)...
Charles Bukowski’s “Some Picnic” is mean-spirited –what a picnic ought not to be. I rank it among the most unpleasant and psychologically cruel. When Bukowski says he, his girlfriend Jane and his parents picnicked and “made a...
Cress’ An Outing defies expectation. No one that I know has managed to project such a cantankerous couple on the grass. Cress is surely squinting at Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe. Maybe? Not happy! See Fred Cress. An Outing (1996)
Bad day, worse picnic! Featured Image: Sue Williams. Picnic (from Whitney Biennial Portfolio). Lithograph. (1997)
Hogg says that Archipelago is a metaphor for a family just out of touch with one another; “The title relates to the family as a group of islands, linked together beneath the surface. What often links a family together goes unspoken and unacknowledged. Families are a...
