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Welcome to 'Worthy Forest' - a picture based very loosely on the Sheldon tapestry map, which was made in around 1590, and is now held at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
The picture imagines the Glastonbury Festival site - Worthy Farm in Pilton, Somerset, England - as if it were somehow transformed to the primeval woodland that once covered much of the country.
But this forest is populated by mythical creatures - some copied from the strange beasts that adorn the margins of Mediaeval illuminated manuscripts, some invented in unusual ways by the artists - for this deeply weird vision was painted by Stanley Donwood along with his two daughters, operating much as Mediaeval painters would have, as a co-operative guild, each member being equal.
Amidst the trees are impossible flowers, and the forest is festooned with multi-coloured flags, representing no country, no state, no affiliation; nothing but the joy and beauty of colour and movement.
A strange pyramidal structure emerges from the leaf-crowned heights of the trees, and the picture is presided by a phoenix superimposed upon a wind-rose, the decorative precursor of the compass which traditionally adorned maps of the Middle Ages.
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