This exhibition was extremely eye-opening and touching. I somehow felt a connection to the artist after reading all of the information cards next to each painting. There were 9 rooms in total, and each introduced fascinating chapters of Nash’s artistic journey. What touched me the most was reading about his traumatic experiences with war, and the thoughts he had while he was going through it. When he looked back at the landscape after the event, he was amazed at how nature continued to keep growing despite the destruction and death. He painted the empty land instead of the corpses, and was one of the most prominent war artists back then. Nash also loved poetry, and collected his thoughts in a very literary way. I found reading his thoughts very inspiring.
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| We Are Making a New World, 1918 |
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| The Pyramids in the Sea, 1912 |
For example, from the room ‘Unseen Landscapes’: “The landscapes I have in mind are not part of the unseen world in a psychic sense, nor are they part of the Unconscious. They belong to the world that lies, visibly, about us. They are unseen merely because they are not perceived,” (1938)
This made me think a lot since it made peculiar sense. I’m not entirely sure exactly what he meant with this, but from my perspective: When we create a landscape, it conveys something about us, whether we like it or not. It is not unseen because it doesn’t exist, it is unseen because it has not yet been perceived by others.
‘The Life of the Inanimate Object’ was also an intriguing room, this was when Nash took an interest in exploring the idea of a life force in inanimate objects, and placing them in his landscapes. He liked the ‘personage’ the objects took and in many of these paintings they had a very personal sense of beauty as well as purpose. In ‘February, the cut tree-trunk and axe seemed to signal a deeper significance of soldier deaths as well as the death of his own father, in the month of February.
With further research I discovered that some objects in his paintings were not always 'symbolic figure equivalents, they had a personal beauty and were present in the landscape in their own right’. “The encounter between objects and the ‘imaginary happenings’ involving them became the subject of the painting,” From this book, I learnt that these encounters were not completely imaginary, but from photographs of still-life arrangements Nash had created. “the objects both prompted memories of the landscapes in which they had been found, and allowed Nash to create new imagines scenes,” Perhaps I could try experimenting with setting up scenes with objects as well. He was also drawn to small geometric objects, but scaling them up in the paintings, creating a mysterious imagined situation.
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| Equivalents for the Megaliths, 1935 |
I took much inspiration from his paintings with light color palettes, usually having a vacant feeling. They were so devoid of activity yet the viewer could still perceive that something big, some event has happened there. The light colors also aid in conveying that faded sense of memory. I find it curious that the audience is still able to tell that those memories were traumatic with such little information from the painting. I hope I can somehow incorporate this in my work.
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| The Shore, 1923 |
