Fleet Foxes & Pieter Bruegel
I am a big fan of Fleet Foxes. Haven't been able to get myself a physical copy yet, but I'll work on it after I get back from Bangkok. Or maybe just get one there. So of course we all are quite intrigued by the cover on the new album. Which turns out surprisingly to be a Bruegel piece. If you are unfamiliar with Bruegel, you can read more here. Basically he is one heck of a Netherlandish painter in his time, and I am in love with his maximalistic style; Tower Of Babel and The Fall Of The Rebel Angels are two of my favourites from him after looking about his works. The work on the CD Cover is called, "Netherlandish Proverbs".
"When you first see that painting it’s very bucolic, but when you look closer there’s all this really strange stuff going on, like dudes defecating coins into the river and people on fire, people carving a live sheep, this weird dude who looks like a tree root sitting around with a dog. There’s all this really weird stuff going on. I liked that the first impression is that it's just pretty, but then you realize that the scene is this weird chaos. I like that you can’t really take it for what it is, that your first impression of it is wrong."
As quoted from the lead vocalist of Fleet Foxes, Robin Pecknold
A painting is sometimes a place of vent for an artist, be in subliminally or not. I find that when the more subtle a master can make his intended message be put across in a piece of work, the more enigmatic that work becomes. Which of course makes it beautiful. Behind Netherlandish Proverbs, Bruegel was examining Fleimish proverbs and translating them visually and literally. He brought a sense of mockery towards humanity and the tireless stupidity behind it through his work.
So I decided to examine this piece more thoroughly, and below you will find some queer points I picked out specifically. Though I am not trying to decipher the proverbs, (I am just not knowledgeable enough to), I just liked to highlight the oddity in some of these visuals. Some are really absurd, and other's just peculiar. I like to carefully inspect the work, and piece out what the artist might had been thinking at his time. It's sad that sometimes on the internet, we don't really give as much effort to inspect a piece of work as when it is being hung in a gallery. Obvious reasons aside, I have to thoroughly agree with Robin that like Fleet Foxes' songs and Bruegel's work, many things creatives create, are always somewhat more than what meets the eye.
And a comprehensive inspection on all the idioms can be found here.
Cool stuff isn't it?
www.myspace.com/fleetfoxes