Robert Martel | Illustrator

The Subjects that Fascinate Me page on my art website has changed little over the past few of years. The page was never meant to be an ongoing and exhaustive listing of things that “fascinate” me but only a sample of a few subjects that have seized my attention and inspired me in my art. You can navigate to the page here.

In this post I want to highlight the first item in my Subjects that Fascinate Me page — the image of the Green Man watercolour at the top of this post. Using graphite, ink, and watercolour tablets and pencils I created the above piece after my youngest child asked me to draw something from my mind. Without thinking I started sketching out a Green Man staring back at me from their forest.

I have been fascinated with the Green Man of English folklore since I was fifteen. I confess it was Alan Moore, Stephen Bissette, and John Totleben’s horror comic book, Swamp Thing, that nurtured my fascination with the Green Man. At it’s core, Swamp Thing is a love story between a Plant Elemental named Alec and a human woman named Abby.

Although Swamp Thing is a Plant Elemental, writers like Moore, and those who succeeded him, never really tried to connect him with the broad concept of the Green Man. It wasn’t until I began listening to Jethro Tull’s 1976 album, Songs from the Wood, that I saw how the English folkloric Green Man could could serve as an extension of a comic book character I had gown to love.

In the fall of 1990 the local radio station held a huge LP sale in my town’s hocky rink. Already acquainted with Jethro Tull’s music, I bought a half dozen of the band’s albums for .10 cents each (absurd price but no complaints). My favorite LP was Songs from the Wood and I played the album over and over while doing my schoolwork. I also listened the album when I read my Swamp Thing comics which served to solidify the connection between Swamp Thing and the English Green Man.

With songs like “Jack-in-the-Green,” and “Cup of Wonder” (both which referenced the Green Man) I was inspired to take my affection for Swamp Thing into a new area of exploration, that being the Green Man present in medieval English architecture. I’ll discuss the Green Man or the “Foliate Head” architectural motif in my next post.

Thanks for reading!