After Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s ‘Netherlandish Proverbs’

I recently completed (and sold) a drawing of Pieter Bruegel’s Netherlandish Proverbs. It’s the same size as the painting — 117 cm × 163 cm — and made up of forty-eight paper panels. As with the other large multi-panel drawings I’ve made, I don’t smooth out the joins in the work but allow the grid like structure to subtly show through.

It was a great piece to draw as there is something of interest in every part of the work. Each panel stands up as worth looking at. By making this I’ve become aware of all sorts of detail I might otherwise have missed.

It’s full of visual representation of proverbs and saying. Some are well-known and still familiar to us (the guy in the bottom left hand corner is banging his head against a brick wall, for example) and easily understood, but some are more obscure.

There’s more information about the painting and the proverbs here.

Now, what next…?

 

 

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How to make a Digital Rain collage…

Digital Rain: Time

Since October last year I’ve been making the Digital Rain series of work. It’s grown and grown – too big to post here in detail, but I post almost everything on Instagram and Twitter, so you can follow my progress there.

Last weekend I made a fifteen minute video that explains how I made one of the series – posted above – and posted it on YouTube. My speech is a bit clipped as I had to slightly speed it up to upload it. When I started making it I didn’t know what I was going to make which is in line with the improvised nature of the project.