After meeting Andrew Moorhouse, founder and editor of Fine Press Poetry, at a gallery opening in York, Attree showed him several of these studies. Moorhouse, who specialises in publishing limited edition books of contemporary poetry illustrated by contemporary artists, proposed a collaboration with poet Michael Symmons Roberts, and correspondingly suggested that Attree look at Bruegel’s work and consider a poetic response.

The result is TAKK, which Moorhouse notes:

It’s the first book where I’ve taken an original piece of art as the inspiration, and I’d like to expand on that more and more. The word “takk” means “thank you” in various Scandinavian languages, and to a certain extent, Michael’s response to the Bruegel was indirect.

Attree’s response to Bruegel, however, is both direct and indirect. His oil pastels evidently transcribe Bruegel’s painting, replicating its composition, motifs and colours. But as he mapped aspects of the narrative, focusing on genre details - which in Bruegel’s work often express something greater than the whole - Attree reimagined the painting, blurring its epic depth and seemingly endless forms. As Moorhouse points out:

What dominated the Bruegel is still there in the Attree but it is obscured, uncertain. Jake also chose to show the mourners around Mary and those in supplication praying for some sort of salvation. But he also extrapolated the story to reflect the distressingly current tale of people fleeing from persecution. In indeterminate landscapes we’re put in mind of the citizens of Aleppo desperate to escape bombardment directed by their own president; the peoples of the republics of central Africa trying to escape genocidal actions in uncivil wars rooted in the imperial actions of European nations; or refugees having to abandon the tyrannies of poverty and/or drought in the dry lands of Northern Africa.