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Big Fish eat Little Fish
- Oil on Canvas
- 32 x 2 inches
- unframed
- £150.00
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My painting is based on one of the most haunting of Pieter Bruegel the Elder's works. Big Fish Eat Little Fish is among the first of the artist's many treatments of proverbs in drawing and subsequently engraved by Pieter van der Heyden.
The image reveals many small and large fish tumbling out of the mouth of an enormous beached fish. A small, helmeted figure with an oversized knife slices open the big fish's belly, revealing even more marine creatures. The meaning of the drawing by Bruegel relates to the theme of a senseless world in which the powerful instinctively and consistently prey on the weak. The original drawing by Bruegel was dated 1556 yet the meaning of this proverb still prevails today.
The original drawing was in black and white and as I love the works of Bruegel I thought I would bring his picture into my colourful world.
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