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Fig.2 Paul Nash, Void ,1918. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa The War is portrayed through a breach of the landscape, producing an effect of disorientation between natural and man-made.
Soil and Identity Throughout history, rural England has been galvanised (shedding parts that do not fit) as an image of authenticity to oppose the rise of industrialism, capitalism and the modern – things that become critical in times of disturbance and war. Landscape as sanctuary re-characterises the land when set against the violence and political turmoil of both cities and battlefields. Rural romanticism calls up an ancient feeling of freedom and equality before the threat of invasion. It is in the tradition of landscape painting that the power of memory was evoked to create a holistic picture of the rural and consequently, of England. The symbolic nature of the landscape is precisely what landscape painters attempted to preserve – a deliberate appeal to memory, even if falsified.
Nash follows in the line of traditional landscape painting but never falls neatly into any particular category. Sometimes termed a neo-romanticist, he also relates to aspects of surrealism and abstract painting. Traditional he was not, but elements of his work do reference traditional sources, borrowed and adapted from other (English) artists. Nash travelled and painted abroad, but felt he belonged in the English landscape. It was a feeling inherited from a childhood of escaping his house in the city. In painting the English landscape, he felt he gained sanctuary. A cultural bond to the landscape is an oneirism emanating from emotional responses to place making. Neil Leach alludes to a process of identification with the landscape as being mythic. It is the resoluteness of ‘an identity rooted to the soil’ that causes such strong associations.
1 Leach, Neil. The dark side of the domus’, Journal of Architecture , 3(1): 31-42, 1998
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