The Story Behind the Green Man — From Odin to MUSE

One of the first drawings I ever made began with a pair of eyes.

Back in 2017, sitting at my kitchen table, I started drawing a face that I eventually called Odin.

I had no idea at the time that this drawing would stay with me for years, change and evolve, travel to Germany, and eventually become the opening image of my new book, MUSE.

Where the drawings began

I had started drawing after a short but serious illness in 2017.

I don’t really know what changed inside me, but afterwards I found myself wanting to work in a completely different way. Until then, I had loved painting large, atmospheric landscapes full of colour. Suddenly, I wanted to do the opposite. I wanted to draw extreme detail.

I wanted to lose myself in the process of creating another world — my own personal visual mythology.

So I started drawing.

And the drawings simply fall out of me. Sitting at the kitchen table, these incredibly complex pencil drawings seemed to pour out of me, one after another. I still don't know where they were coming from, and I certainly didn't have a grand project in mind for them. I simply needed to draw.

Odin

Odin was one of the first.

As with many of my drawings, I began with the eyes and worked outwards from the centre. There was no preliminary sketch and no carefully composition waiting underneath.

There was simply an idea. I just started drawing, adding elements as the drawing needed them. The pencil doing the work and leading me somewhere else.The drawing grew organically. Because of this, I’ve always had a particular relationship with Odin. It never felt quite like an ordinary drawing to me. It felt almost like a talisman. As though, while I was working, the drawing was somehow speaking to me.

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Eventually the original drawing was sold. It now lives somewhere in the Black Forest in Germany. It was a wrench to sell it. After spending so many hours with a drawing, handing over the original can feel surprisingly emotional. But there was something rather fitting about where it ended up. Knowing that my strange, ancient-looking figure was now living in the Black Forest made me feel, somehow, as though he had gone home.

Fortunately, I was able to make several prints of the original on really good watercolour paper. This meant I could return to the drawing over several years and begin to make adjustments..

The eyes became blue.

Leaves appeared in green.

Gold embellishments were added.

The character changed. What had started life as Odin gradually became something else.

He became the Green Man.

I love the fact that the drawing has never really been finished. It has grown over the years, just as my own work has grown.

But what to do with the drawing : Enter MUSE

So, after all this time, what was I going to do with him? When the idea for MUSE came to me, I knew immediately that the Green Man had to be part of it. But I didn't want him simply to be another illustration in an art book. I wanted to see what somebody else might find in him. What story might they see? What does this strange face say to somebody who has never sat at my kitchen table and watched him develop?

So I put the idea out into the wide world and hoped that someone might like him enough to write about him. Fortunately, someone did. Writer and broadcaster Phil Carradice saw the Green Man and understood something of what I had been trying to express through all those thousands of pencil lines. He wrote a short poem inspired by the drawing.

And that poem will accompany the Green Man as the very first double-page spread in MUSE.

MUSE is more than an art book

This is what makes MUSE particularly special to me. It isn't simply a collection of my drawings. It is a creative collaboration between artists and writers.

I have invited twelve writers to contribute stories and poems inspired by the illustrations.

The contributors are a wonderfully mixed group — from internationally bestselling author Joanne Harris, author of Chocolat, to writers who are right at the beginning of their own writing adventures. I deliberately wanted that mixture. The drawings began as something deeply personal — a visual mythology that emerged almost without explanation.

Now other people are taking those images and interpreting them in their own way.

The result is something neither I nor the writers could have created alone.

And perhaps that is what MUSE is really about.

An image can begin a story.A story can change the way we see an image.

From my kitchen table to a book

It is rather extraordinary to think that a drawing which began at my kitchen table nearly ten years ago is now going to become the opening of a book created through collaboration with writers. And there is another piece of good news.

The MUSE Kickstarter campaign has been selected as a “Projects We Love” by Kickstarter — a lovely endorsement of the project and a real encouragement to me. Kickstarter says the designation is given to projects its team particularly responds to for their creativity, innovation or community impact.

But there is still a long way to go. MUSE is being funded through Kickstarter, and I need to raise enough to make the book a reality.

So if this project sounds like something you would enjoy — a beautifully printed collection of detailed drawings, stories, poems and a little bit of visual mythology — please take a look at the campaign.

And if you aren't able to back it, sharing it with someone who might be interested is incredibly helpful too.

Thank you for following the story of MUSE.

And thank you for allowing me to share a little more of the story behind the drawings.

Bonnie x