The Procession to Calvary after Peter Bruegel the Elder by Jake Attree

In Jake's own words:
The largest painting in this show and its two corresponding oil pastels – “The Procession to Calvary, after Pieter Bruegel the Elder” – are part of an ongoing obsession with that particular artist.  At school in York many years ago, I came across a book on “North European Painting” in which there were reproductions of Bruegel’s “The Hunters in the Snow” and “The Gloomy Day” from the Seasons series.  I was struck by how much “The Gloomy Day” reminded me of standing on Baile Hill in York with my father when I was a young boy.  

“The Procession to Calvary” has always struck me as a singularly beautiful and enormously complex painting.  The best way for me to begin to understand a painting is to draw from it, the two oil pastels and the large oil being parts of the result of that constant exercise.  “Small corner of a Flemish Garden” is also testimony to my enduring fascination with Bruegel; it is based on the right-hand side of “The Corn Harvest”, again from the Seasons series and drawings I made in the Museum Gardens in York, so it is an amalgam of images not relying on either source directly but emerging from two.