Det europæiske forår – Book cover (Gyldendal)

Kaspar Colling Nielsen’s third novel, Det europæiske forår (The European Spring) takes place in a future of pervasive drones and dramatic technological developments, and one of the book’s central themes is the conflict between “natural” and “artificial”.

The cover image is a still life in the classic European tradition with the added ingredient of an insect-sized drone, a symbol of the meeting of nature and technology. The image is a composite of about fifteen source paintings, photos, and drawings that have been merged, cloned, scaled, filtered, and otherwise manipulated to conjure something that (hopefully) looks like a coherent painting.*

The image also exists in an extended version as a poster (100 x 95 cm, see below) where more of the motif is visible, including the glass vase containing the flowers, a snail, more insects, and a blister pack of pills.

Published by Gyldendal, 2017. Edited by Janne Breinholt Bak.

* The main source is Jan Brueghel II’s Still Life with Flowers in a Glass (c. 1625 – c. 1630, oil paint on copper), available for free download and use with hundreds of thousands of other well-indexed high resolution images from Rijksstudio, the online collection of the Rijksmuseum.

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