Halfland is Sottobosco!

So, I was a Googlin' one day a few months back and looking up an extraordinary painting—you likely know it, but it was new to me—of a rabbit sitting in a forest (NOT his piece entitled, "Hare in the Forest" but his work called, "The Hare" or, as known in Italian, "La Lepre") with many other vivid creatures around it, including a twig and, above the rabbit's head, a single bee theatrically placed in the air. I learned that it was painted by Hans Hoffmann• in 1585 AD. The original, in this gorgeous frame, currently hangs in the Galleria Nazionale di Palazzo Corsini.

The thing is, this painting was not only unique to Hans Hoffmann's work, but as it was painted in the winter of 1585, it may have been the first time a nearly life-sized subject, with what was around them in nature, was studied and depicted together in art anywhere. Albrecht Dürer, during the German Renaissance, indeed made stunning sketches of wildlife, a radical act at that time, and was integral to Hoffmann's art and career. I believe Hoffmann was hired by Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II of Habsburg, the most significant art patron in the world at the time, to emulate Dürer's artistic Naturalism revolution. These works were popular and available in insufficient amounts to satisfy collector demand. Good copyists, like Hoffmann, were sponsored to fill the desire.

What's relevant to me is that the cultural change taking place at that time and place toward seeing Divine beauty in Nature, instead of only in biblical tales, political figures, and celebrities, is happening again. The era I've lived in has held Beauty and Nature as equal, elevated, and part of Creation in all its glory. However, when Hoffmann created his works of nature, no one would have understood the necessity of spending time and materials on rendering an insect or a branch.

The rise of science transformed the understanding of the natural world and gave rise to the appreciation of realism, closer observation of the world around us and its details.

We can't really know what brings about these epic epoc-making shifts in perception of what's essential in life as they infiltrate and reflect in a culture's art. But we can track the process in hindsight over time and draw certain conclusions about what their influences were. We can see it happening though history, again and again. Like climbing a spiral staircase, going round in circles but lifting higher.

This brings me to why this caught my attention so deeply. Cracking open this geode of art and cultural history gave me the precise genre of art Halfland is, although I knew nothing about it for the entire 32 years of 1/2L creation so far!

I had just created the "Dark" art piece for the Akt 4 scenes and was, in a sense, actually rendering in 3D a forest floor when I saw the Hare in the Forest image posted to a blog. It struck me as similar in aesthetics to Halfland. So much so that it prompted me to search for further information about it and its creation.

Google provided the term, Sottobosco. My Dudes, this is fascinating!

"...The art term 'sottobosco' originates from the Italian phrase meaning 'undergrowth of a forest.' It refers to a sub-genre of still-life painting that focuses on the dark, often damp, and mysterious realm of the forest floor, including rot,  rot, mosses, and small creatures...."

Um, Halfland much?! Reading about this was like hearing a significant penny drop into a gumball machine. Chunky Glonk!

It was an epiphany for me. Everything began to make sense.

Halfland is Sottobosco. And now I also live in one.

During these same weeks, I was crafting a new sleeping spot for myself in our home's untouched 100-year-old attic. For 15 years, I'd been collapsing on an old makeshift futon in the art studio above the street traffic and noisy neighbors. It would fill with incredible sunlight from windows on all sides early each morning, which I loved, but every creak and crouch of the old floor and truck and slam happening so nearby would jar me awake after very little rest—chronically no rest, actually.

I had to get creative for a solution, even if it was outrageous. A few years back, we had the attic of the house reinforced with trusses, and they built short walls on both sides under the roof to anchor the vertical thrust of the added weight. This gave us two large storage areas behind both walls for bulky but light items.

I dug out an 8'x10' corner inside the store room as my new bedroom, slightly removed from the street and first-floor tenants, and completely silent and dark. I couldn't stand up inside it as it's a sloped wedge space, so I called it a Bunny Burrow to make that limitation an asset. I created a backstory for the new space, complete with logo, vintage postcards, and Sottobosco artwork. It would be a quiet vintage forest cabin that I would "rent" from imaginary hosts of several hand-built forest cabins to retreat to often. It would look like a Victorian train compartment with luxurious appointments for restful sleep whenever I wanted.

It's taken me many months to carefully finish furnishing it, but it's already improved my health and finally given me a real, genuine, restful spot for the first time in my life.

It's been like visiting and sleeping inside a vintage work of art each night. The layers of detail are as fun as Disney Imagineers may have made them, maybe even more so. I love it so much that I keep it private, but will share photos only here, right now.

Halfland Readers and Sottobosconians, Welcome to the charming Victorian train compartment, quiet, luxurious forest cabin, and Sottobosco art piece I rest in called Bunny Burrow!

(Clicking on any image in the above album will show a caption explaining things a bit more.)

Building the Victorian Vivarium for the Burrow. Very Halflandian!

(* Note that Google searches for "Hans Hoffmann" will bring up a later German Abstractionist painter that was born and worked much after the one explored here. Even though the more recent Hofmann's name is correctly spelled with only one "f". I had to specify the 16th-century Hans Hoffmann every single time.)

** AI was not employed to create this post. All of the ideas presented were my own human-generated observations.