Lαмъτοи∙hιƒ∙Ʋỷμм

   I referred to this painting in my last post without showing it so here it is! I decided to paint this image because of my heritage being from the Northeast of England. When I was a child my family introduced me to Worm Hill when visiting more of my family in Penshaw. This story comes from what was once known as county Durham (before redistricting) and involves the dukes of the past.

  The hill has a slight spiral around the top and it's said that was created by the dragon in the story. I made a few decisions when composing this including Lambton's armor being from the first crusade. During that time the language was slowly transitioning from Old English of the Anglo-Saxons to Middle English of the Normans and was slow to reach the north. The lettering on the bottom of the image is mostly Middle English but the grammar and phonetics are Old English. Also you can observe the Duke Lambton's crest of a Ram's head which I placed over the crest of county Durham.

  Saint George's cross was common amongst the crusaders but I had to put it in to allude to Geroge's similar story of killing a dragon. In some versions of the story he creates a suit of armor out of spearheads so he might look like a hedgehog but I decided that would look stupid and would prefer it to be crusader armor. The scene depicts when Lambton confronts the dragon in the River Wear as to keep the bifurcated serpent segments from reattaching.

  The colors are completely Korean. I had just come back from a trip to South Korea and visiting temples there I saw a really neat color scheme which I wanted to use. I didn't want to use standard coloring with a sap-green dragon and traditional colors thought of when imagining old England- I do this because most of our ideas of the medieval times and earlier were romanticized and bastardized by the Victorians. This results in real art and music from that time to seem very foreign or alien.

I've found that the eastern European views of that period of time to feel much more closely extrapolated from that culture.

  There are what are known as "Celtic" weaving patterns around the border because that's what you'd find in the area back then. The term "Celtic" is a little confusing because it doesn't only refer to Gaelic cultures which were in Wales, West England, Ireland, northern France and northern Spain. These patterns should be just as associated with Scandinavian cultures with which the British Ilse have been closely affiliated since forever. I think this is something the Victorians also did.

Anyhow any and all of the 'facts' used in this post may be highly suspect and incorrect so don't use it as a source for your scientific anthropological thesis. I'm just explaining why I painted this image like this okay? Get off my freakin' back alright?

More fun to come tomorrow! Be there or be a variety of standard shapes!