Picasso Art + Framers

Picasso’s first came to my attention last month when my girlfriend’s parents purchased a large giclee reproduction of a Michael Challen landscape from them. Challen was a Western Australia artist who killed himself earlier this year for a number of personal and financial reasons. Impressed by his work, which combines an intense degree of photorealism with a certain interest in the transcendent, and intrigued by the gallery that carried his work, I went in to have a closer look.
The gallery’s focus tends towards Western Australian artists and visions of the state’s landscape. The prints are better the originals. I was particularly impressed by Christian Fletcher’s panoramic landscape photographs of Cape Naturaliste, Meelup Beach and the Redgate and Yungarra wineries. I liked Mel Brigg’s lonely, striking images, too, with his figures not so much together as alone in a group, and in any case dwarfed by the harsh and unforgiving landscapes of bright pigment that surround them. There are other, less accomplished works available – Impressionism, mostly, genteel and derivative, and stripped of whatever radicalism it once contained in the interest of decorating people’s houses – but the balance is nevertheless impressive. I have looked in on the works in the Carine store, too, and had a similar reaction.
I should briefly mention the other service mentioned in the business’s name. Picasso’s will frame everything from artwork to photography to sporting memorabilia. I haven’t had them frame anything myself, but I imagine they’d do a bang-​up job if I did. They certainly did one on the Michael Challen that now hangs over the staircase of our house.