We visited Lakeside Gallery to see Paula Rego and Grayson Perry's exhibitions, where each artist was given a room to set up their works. Both artists used different yet similar mediums, such as lithographs, printmaking, and carvings. With a variety of sizes both artists used, all sorts of details can be seen in all of their works, from small words only visible up close to quick and simple shapes that still show art pieces.
Rego was born and raised in Portugal during the Salazar dictatorship to Anglophile parents. These parents instilled in Rego a love for books and stories of all kinds and encouraged her to read and speak English. Rego was a voracious reader, and her early years were surrounded by great literature books whose vivid and graphic ideas made an indelible impression on her imagination.
Paula Rego: Visions of English Literature aims to spark new ways of seeing the world through these seemingly familiar, age-old stories.
In 1989, Rego made a book of Nursery Rhymes for her first granddaughter, Carmen, who was two years old. Her delight in turning the songs into pictures spurred her to make the long series of etchings.
She used these well-known figures from the nursery rhymes with her own twist to tell stories that combine fantasy and imagination, innocence and cruelty, to explore the complexities of life and the experience of women in particular, in all its strangeness and mystery. In her art, these stories can be told with just one glance.
(Baa, Baa Black Sheep, 1989, Etching and aquatint)
(Old Mother Goose, 1989, Hand coloured etching and aquatint)
(Peter in the Bird's Nest, 1992, Coloured etching and aquatint)
The Peter Pan etchings are among Rego's most ingenious. She illustrated scenes from the play using imagery, creating atmosphere, and shifting from freedom from what the story depicts to shudders of fear and threats. Far from being the happy, imaginative images we recognise from Hollywood, Rego's travels through Peter Pan's adventures are, in many ways, the stuff of nightmares. This piece was inspired by The Picture Storybook of Peter Pan, which Rego owned as a child (below).
Greyson Perry is an artist that I really like because of the amount of detail he puts into his work. His art can be any size, from A2 to much more extensive. The quantity of detail he puts into his art is astounding to me because the meaning of the art may be the exact opposite of what one can think of.
'He is also known for his ceramic vases, tapestries, and cross-dressing, as well as his observations of the contemporary art scene, and for dissecting British "prejudices, fashions and foibles".' - Wikipedia.
Like Paula Rego, Perry is a great storyteller. His works often combine images and the written word to enhance our reading of them. Rather than looking to existing literary sources for inspiration, his narratives come from his imagined or fantasy world.
These subjects are personal - "things I care about" - and include family, art, sex, class, beauty, and money.
(Animal Spirit, 2016, Woodcut print)
Perry pictures a hybrid creature, a cross between a bear and a bull, cut open like an anatomical illustration to reveal its innards. The work refers to the world of financial investment and the stock market, specifically to the 2008 economic crash. The artist has stated that the title of the print—Animal Spirit—was a term used by commentators at the time as if the crisis unleashed was the result of some mystical force rather than due to the risky behaviour and mismanagement of those controlling the market.
Financiers in the City use the terms 'bull' and 'bear' to refer to different market conditions and types of investors. Other symbols in the image allude to the names given to traditional patterns in the graphs used by traders to show trends in market prices. The abandoned baby, three black crows, and hanging man graph shapes reveal fluctuations between 'bullish' (optimistic) and 'bearish' (pessimistic) trends.
(Selfie with Political Causes, 2018, woodcut print)
"I made this piece in response to the rise of Social Justice Warriors, particularly online. They are out to rid the world of racism, homophobia, sexism and poverty. Still, they struggle with democracy, free speech, and tolerance, as shown by the toxic fumes being emitted from the exhaust pipes. My inspiration was an Indian miniature equestrian portrait with an enormous horse and a tiny rider perched upon its back. I liked the feeling of a puny human sitting upon a powerful mount that was a bit out of control."
(Vote for Me!, 2023, woodcut print)
"Vote for Me! is a self-portrait of Margaret Thatcher. There's an assumption in the art world that all artists are left of centre - and that all their audience is left of centre. They're just alienating half their audience!
I often ask gallery directors when their next Tory exhibition will be because they always have exhibitions about progressive subjects. You've got to tease the Left nowadays because they're just as full of pomposity and orthodoxy as the Right.
Expect, though, that as you get richer, you get more Tory. When your tax bill passes the prime minister's wages, as mine did a few years ago, you suddenly get very politically concerned."
(Six Snapshots of Julie, 2015, six woodcut prints with lithographic underlays)
This piece has to be my favourite out of the ones I saw at the exhibition, the way the eyes on both figures stand out and stare back at the viewer, the way one of the pairs glows from the darkness, making a viewer who viewed the image at a glance relook at the whole thing only to see that there is indeed two figures there, not one. This is Julie Cope, a fictional character created by the artist. From birth to death, her story is that of an Essex everywoman told through several works, including tapestries, ceramics and an extended ballad written and read by Perry. The artist's words chart an average life's trials, tribulations, celebrations and mistakes. The narrative originated in his project A House for Essex (2012-15), now a guesthouse and shrine to Julie in the village of Wrabness that houses the artist's original artworks.
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