The Green Man (England’s Dark Dreaming № 19)
This is the nineteenth large-scale charcoal drawing in my England’s Dark Dreaming series.
Green Men appear frequently as architectural ornaments on churches and other buildings across Europe from the 5th century onwards, human faces either wreathed in leaves or with branches sprouting from the mouth. There’s no historical evidence of what they were meant to signify, but popular imagination links them to nature spirits, fertility symbols, and woodwose (wild men of the woods, which were common figures in Medieval European stories and art).
For the purposes of this series he can be read as a combination between tree spirit and woodwose, representing the antithesis of human civilization.