The Trees and the Axe 1912

Arthur Rackham conjured this image with ink and watercolour. Imagine him hunched over his drawing board, meticulously cross-hatching to build depth and texture. I feel a lot of kinship with Rackham here, actually. The greyscale palette with earthy washes reminds me of my own forays into the uncanny. But where I might be using big, bold strokes, Rackham’s got this incredible control. Look how he uses line to create gnarled, almost human-like qualities in the trees. And those faces! It's not photorealism. It is something else, which reminds me of the work of Paula Rego or Leonora Carrington. The process of creating an image is an act of world-building, transforming the mundane into the magical. It's like Rackham’s saying, "Hey, art doesn't have to mimic reality; it can invent its own." And isn't that the joy of it all? The way artists keep talking to each other across time, nudging us to see the world anew.