Come Unto the Corn (England’s Dark Dreaming № 9)

This is the ninth large-scale charcoal drawing in my England’s Dark Dreaming series.

This is the only drawing in this series that explicitly references some of my earlier artwork (a drawing and a photograph of the same name, both from a few months before I began this series, shown below). The drawing is named after a 2015 song by spook-folk band The Hare and the Moon.

The figure bears a sheaf of corn and a sickle and wears a corn mask, and has a mythic role related to the Harvest and all its connotations of blood, death, and sacrifice (and rebirth) as in the traditional British folk song John Barleycorn.

As a minor point for non-British readers, in British English “corn” refers to wheat (and sometimes barley or oats), whereas in American English “corn” refers to maize. The artist resolutely draws in British English.