The Six Seasons – Late Summer (after Bruegel)

Large size
Edition of 15 + 2 APs
142cm W x 105cm H / 150cm W x 113cm H framed
Mounted on 2mm Dibond, floated in black-stained oak box frame with AR/UV 92% Art Glass

Small size
Edition of 20 + 2 APs
52cm W x 38.4cm H / 54.6cm W x 41cm H framed
Mounted on 5mm Kapa, in black stained oak box frame with AR/UV 92% Art Glass

The imagery in this work was taken in East Sussex and Kent, and brings together scenes from Rye, Brede Valley, Dungeness, Hythe Ranges military facility, and Folkestone.

In the foreground the relaxing harvest workers in Bruegel’s painting have become families of picnickers, together with frisbee, tupperware and thermos flask in preparation for a day out in nature, perhaps to ‘Pick Your Own Fruit’. The contrast with Bruegel’s paintings indicates the profound shift in our relationship with nature in developed countries: what was once an experience of labour on the land, often as a family group, and then relaxation afterwards (again, as par t of a community) has become a leisure experience to be consumed as something ‘different’ or ‘other’. The sense of separation from the land thus becomes echoed in a sense of separation from each other, with ‘time together’ needing to be planned and manufactured much like everything else.

The industrialised landscape in the distance also echoes this shift, with wind farms, factories and mammoth machine-made hay bales in the distance in contrast to the hay on a car t in Bruegel’s original. Far off on the horizon, the white cliffs of England’s south coast echo how nature and landscape come to feature strongly in concepts of national (and by extension personal) identity, even though we may be increasingly separated from it.