Paul Nash (1889–1946) is one of the most important artists of the first half of the twentieth century and the most evocative landscape painter of his generation. He is best known for his work as an official war artist, producing some of the most memorable images of both the First and Second World Wars.
Nash enlisted in the army in 1914 when World War I broke out. In spring 1917 Nash arrived on the battlefields of the Ypres Salient in Northern France. Initially he wrote that he was ‘as excited as a schoolboy’ and thought the landscape looked ‘not unlike Sussex’. Later, however, after a period of leave he arrived in the aftermath of the Battle of Passchendaele, ‘the blindest slaughter of a blind war’, and his eyes were opened to the horrors of war. Nash continued to concentrate on landscape and his outrage at the waste of life was expressed through the violation of nature, producing powerful and confident landscapes that were both visionary and terrifyingly realistic (adapted from http://www.tate.org.uk).
In the style of Paul Nash, and based on the photograph at the top of this entry, Prep VI used chalk and charcoals to recreate their own versions of the photograph in the style of Paul Nash. Click on the images below to see them larger, and you’ll see what a wonderful job the children have done in their versions.
