“the earth the colour of a hare” Picture Two

I describe the stages of the second picture in my new project.

This picture took me a little longer than usual to make. I had a fruitless beginning on one day, and then on a following day, I completed the bottom frieze. After that, it took a while and a lot of thinking to add further components. I added the right hand component, terram, first, and but it took a couple more days of experiments, before I was satisfied with the third component, at the top of the card.

I began the picture thinking about travelling across the countryside in coaches and stopping at inns. I had recently been reading Parson James Woodforde, who does a lot of this. The horses in the picture have been detached from their carriage, separated, and their order reversed. I hope that they do suggest dashing over the countryside. Nature took over in this picture, and the frieze at the bottom conveys economically a landscape with creatures in it. The fox himself is part of the ground for the horses.

The frieze clearly owes a lot to my familiarity with medieval friezes; although, I did not seek a medieval atmosphere in this montage. The upper components suggest sky and heavenly bodies. Terram is Latin for land, earth, soil, in the accusative. This word is a piece cut out from an illustration of a manuscript which I have had for years. The bronze half disc shaped pieces are two parts of a picture of an old plate. The red, white, and green scrap is a leftover piece from when I cut out the leaves. Sometimes, I fortuitously add a leftover piece like this.

The top component was the hardest to get right, and I made several attempts with many different scraps. One image in this component is that of a hazelnut, another is a small wooden dish, and a loaf of bread sits on the top. Acorns connect the dish and the loaf.

I am at once suggesting the fruits of the land, perhaps even refreshment at inns, and suns, moons, perhaps cloud, and planets. The circular shapes and light work towards this. The texture on the loaf make it look like a landscape in minature.

If you would like to support me, you can find a print of this new montage picture here on my prints page.