Just what it says. All it needs are some picnickers. Featured Image: Picnic (Tea for Two study). Watercolor on paper
A picnic in the woods is a novelty for Billy Bathgate, a fifteen-year-old New York City boy who has never walked on anything but pavement. So, when Drew Preston, a worldly woman of twenty-one, says,” Let’s go for a picnic….” Billy is flummoxed. He...
Oscar Hijuelos’s Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989) is about Cuban immigrants in the 1950s. Music and food sometimes blend, and at a hotel club, there are platters of roast suckling pig, rice and beans, and a chocolate-éclair cake drenched in honey. But for a...
At first glance, it’s a group posing for a photograph, but scrutiny reveals a group of vampires actively pursuing what they do best. Then you realize that Jeff Wall’s photograph Vampires’ Picnic (1991) is political satire, an allusion to Karl...
Animal Dreams describes a celebration of All Souls’ Day in Grace, Arizona. The cemetery is on a hill above the town. Once there, the graves are cleaned and decorated, after which the family enjoys a picnic. The protagonist Codi says, “We were a harvester-ant clan...
Isla Sorna is a dangerous place to picnic. Traveling by Range Rover over Costa Rica’s bumpy roads to a deserted beach, the Bowman family for adventure and picnicking on the beach. When they get there, they are alone. Ellen Bowman is afraid of snakes. Young Cathy...
Lucy Rawlinson, the granddaughter of Gwen Raverat, paints under the name Lucy Raverat. A series of three picnic-themed picnic paintings is a metaphor for the state of her mind, evolving from troubled and uncertain o hopeful. In 1986, The Picnic suggest trouble...
“Passing 50 Without Breaking the Speed Limit” is Peter Mayle’s paean to picnics. It’s a pun on the celebration of his fiftieth birthday pique-nique and not the speed limit on the twisty roads of Province in restored 19th-century caléches. Mayle...
Mann’s photograph Picnic on the Grass is a portrait of her daughter at a picnic sitting in the same pose as Victorine Meurent, the model for the nude in Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass. Jessie at 7 shows her daughter Jesse sitting on the Grass with a plate of food: a...
Ringgold’s tapestry Tar Beach (1988) and her children’s story Tar Beach (1991) portray a classic urban rooftop picnic. When Cassie Lightfoot flies over the rooftops of Harlem, the lights of the George Washington Bridge glow against the black sky like...
