He’s toasting us with a cocktail. This interesting plate is part of the current Picasso exhibit at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. It is titled Cavalier Faun. The creature on the horse is a mythical faun, half goat and half human. If you look closely you can see his horns. One of the participants on a tour I led said the faces around the edge depict the crowd seated around the bull fighting ring.
With his drink glass tilted jauntily in one hand the faun isn’t as serious a picador as one might expect to see at a bullfight. His eyes are looking at us the viewers, rather than straight ahead to see where the horse is going. One gallery visitor on a tour I was leading said the line at the bottom of the horse makes it look almost like a toy rocking horse. They thought the horse looked a little bull legged.
The design The Cavalier Faun served Picasso well. He used it on many plain white earthenware plates and also on a series of gold medallions.
Picasso was born in Spain and attended many bullfights. His fascination with the sport is evidenced in other works currently on display at the Winnipeg Art Gallery like the lino cut above called Le Banderilla.
Other posts………..
It was my first tour with a translator and so I had to give information in small bits and then wait while it was translated into Mandarin. Hearing Mandarin spoken again, and talking with the tour participants about places that I had come to know, made me nostalgic. It was a nice feeling though. I’m not sorry I live in Canada now but chatting with my tour participants from China brought back fond memories of the time I spent in Asia. 
After Angela had told us about her story stick it was our turn to make our own story sticks. My story stick had many items including three beads to represent my siblings, feathers for my sons and a shell for our family’s lakeside cottage.
As students view Shelley’s woodcut series called Resting With Warriors they are invited to dress up in moccasins and sashes similar to the ones worn by the women in Shelley’s artwork. Then students write words or phrases to describe each woman. Later they get into groups to arrange those words into a poem like the one that starts this blog post.
Shelley’s art is very much influenced by the bead, birchbark and carving work she saw being created around her while growing up on the Mohawk Nation near Brantford Ontario. She is dedicated to producing art that contributes to aboriginal identity in Canada. In a film interview she says she particularly likes seeing the way young girls react to her work. She wants to provide them with an alternate image of aboriginal women, one not usually seen in the mass media. Shelley is an artist adept at film making, painting, beadwork, photography and sculpture. 
If you visit the Winnipeg Art Gallery right now you can also see another installation by Shelley Niro called Final Moments Thinking of You. A tour group of high school students I had in the gallery last week told me the title could mean two things. One is that the world is in its final moments because of climate change and environmental damage so the photos are a way to say good-bye to the elements of earth, water, fire and air. Another interpretation was that these are images a person is seeing just before they die. They loved nature so these are the things they would see in their final moments. 