Paula Rego

(British, born 1935)

The Curved Planks 64.2 x 50 cm. (25 1/4 x 19 5/8 in.) and smaller

Footnotes

Literature
T.G.Rosenthal Paula Rego - The Complete Graphic Work, London, 2012 (R.257-262)

The Curved Planks series is a set of six etchings by Paula Rego, created in 2009, to accompany a written piece of text by the well-known poet, critic and essayist, Yves Bonnefoy.

The fable that accompanies Rego's six etchings illustrates a moral lesson described by Bonnefoy succinctly over three pages. It speaks of conventional assumptions of family life, the longing for something you don't have and the consequences that can come in its absence.

The tale begins with a boy trying to persuade a giant to take him across a river on his very small boat. On the journey over, the giant interrogates the boy on the whereabouts of his family and how he came to be there. It transpires the boy has no family and he, therefore, asks the giant to be his father. The giant refuses but also protects the boy from the water by holding him in one arm and paddling with the other. As the pair get further through the choppy water, the boy climbs higher to allow the giant to paddle more easily but inevitably the tiny boat made of curved planks begins to sink due to the unusual weight of the load. In the end, the giant is forced to swim with the boy against the current and the reader is left both agonising and hoping for a happy outcome to this fatal journey.

As with much of Rego's work and even with the writers she most admires, her expression of the narrative is never an exact rendering of the stories characters, landscapes, or descriptions. Rego's personal touch comes through clearly in these etchings, in the reoccurring characters instantly recognisable from her past oeuvre. Rego, in fact, made a total of twelve etchings for The Curved Planks portfolio before selecting six for the final edition of seventy-five.