Bernardo P. Carvalho “Verdade?!”

Description

The story: Fisherman, dog and lifebuoy in a mini boat on a calm sea. Suddenly stops short. Roughest swell. Foaming wave crests. Threatening bulbous bow of huge cargo vessel. Man overboard. Tugging mermaids. Monster with tentacles and many mouths. Elegant yacht with bikini-clad ladies. The whole truth at the dockland pub bar or a sailor’s yarn?! Yes, and the book?

The pictures in this children’s book by Bernardo P. Cavalho are neither paintings nor drawings. Or both, with little trouble taken over the brushwork. Often the distinctive strokes broaden to form large, connected areas which then regulate the entire composition of the images. The brushstrokes frequently become ragged around the edges and create virtual half-tones with picturesque qualities. The conspicuous element of the book as a whole is its colourfulness, its apparent restriction to two colours: blue and red. There is a third colour, black, due to carefully planned superimposition of blue and red shapes. The artist does not think of black as a colour into which he can dip his instrument, however— although he allows the paper white to become an independent colour as if by magic, in a kind of negative retouching. It is therefore all cleverer than it appears at first glance.

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