Lantern Parade

The sources for Lantern Parade are medieval tapestries and illuminated manuscripts: that particular way of depicting landscape where the trees do not quite look like trees, where creatures inhabit the margins with complete confidence, and where calm seas sit beyond the forest as though another world is just visible through the branches.

Working with Kit Kemp on this design, I drew on that tradition and pushed it somewhere more atmospheric and felt. A patchwork of hillocks and ponds painted with embroidery-like strokes, more abstract mark-making conveying the textures and movement of bark, water, and leaf. Hares and birds carry lanterns through the scene. The woodland they move through has the quality of a place encountered in a dream rather than observed from life, which is exactly where I wanted it to sit.

Kit said of the finished design: "We see magic every time Lantern Parade reveals itself on our walls." I think that is right. It is a design that rewards a second look, and then a third. There is always something you did not notice before.

Three colourways, three completely different moods from the same composition. Dusk is amber and warm, the forest at the close of a long day. Dawn is pale green and cool, the woodland before the world wakes. Midsummer is the deepest blue of the collection: the forest at night, lit only by the lanterns themselves.