When: Thursday, March 10, 2016 6:30 PM
Where : Design Centre, 1 Design Valley, Alto-Porvorim, Bardez, Goa – 403521, Goa Velha (map)
Much art in any medium is produced without a primary concern for how it will be received, or by whom. It often doesn’t set out to appeal to a predefined audience but rather build one for itself. So it’s really quite unusual to ask “ Who should read Picture Books ? ” Yet the absence of an interest and exploration from all ages around Picture Books, leads one to imagine a social reality that type casts the Picture book as a children’s book alone ! The reason of course is quite obvious.
The idea of a picture book, as a literary art form, carries a number of tacit assumptions: picture books are quite large, colourful, easy to read and very simple in their storyline and structure, not very long and produced exclusively for a certain audience, namely children, especially of the younger variety. But is this is a necessary condition of the art form itself? Or is it just a cultural convention, more to do with existing expectations, marketing prejudices and literary discourse?
The simplicity of a picture book in terms of narrative structure, visual appeal and often fable-like brevity might seem to suggest that it is indeed ideally suited to a juvenile readership. It’s about showing and telling, a window for learning to ‘read’ in a broad sense, exploring relationships between words, pictures and the world we experience every day. But is this an activity that ends with childhood, when at some point we are sufficiently qualified to graduate from one medium to another? “Art,” as Einstein reminds us, “is the expression of the most profound thoughts in the simplest way.”
This session aims to share and explore the worlds of some fine Picture Books from the Bookworm collection and to dialogue about this art form that reminds us about the simplest yet most profound feelings that are evoked from reading at any age.
