WALKING AFTER BRUEGEL​ A series of paintings I made as I walked over the Alps from Milan to Munich. The walk was inspired by the alpine crossing Pieter Bruegel made in 1554. He was a young man then on his way home to Antwerp, after two years traveling and perfecting his trade as a draftsman in Italy. The mountain journey would kick start his career. He reworked his alpine sketches into highly acclaimed etchings.Ten years later he’d become the great master painter of the northern renaissance and the Alpine peaks, valleys and passes would re-emerged amongst his native, Flemish estuaries as some of the most beautiful and evocative paintings ever created.         I began my Alpine walk in a Milan coach station in early October 2022 and  finished 40 days later in Munich. To experience the exposure a 16th century traveler like Bruegel would have felt, I walked over the high, remote passes and slept out on the mountain side or in the forested valleys. In my rucksack I carried twenty silk canvases, a single collapsible stretcher frame and a box of dry pigment and gum Arabic for making watercolours, and used the mountain huts, empty in late autumn, as temporary painting studios; I wanted to understand Bruegel’s mountainscapes better by treating the Alps as an artistic subject, like he did.        When I reached Munich, I traveled to Vienna to see some of Bruegel's greatest masterpieces. I hoped on my walk to have gained an insight into how he came up with these unimaginable compositions.