Nash as Johnny, nice painter

Went to see the Paul Nash exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery.

A mid-century (20th) English painter known for war paintings (he was an official war artist in both World Wars), this exhibition 'The Elements' focusses on the theme of nature. The paintings on show (and to an extent the photographs selected to support the nature theme) reveal a dark symbollically oriented sensibility.

The symbolism and imagery mixes English visionary (think Blake) with English contemporary (contemporary that springs to mind being the Famous Five / Swallows & Amazons era) across English landscapes. So amidst rolling downs and woods; birds: hawks or owls; mirrors, felled German bombers, furrowed fields, generally seen at salmon-skyed sundowns or in moonlit nights.

Along with the visionary symbolism, perspective and scale are tipped and skewed; there is a modernist flattening. Some Cubist influence is evident and Cezanne-esque treatments of planes, perspectives and vistas. Arrangements of natural and man-made objects become still-life in landscape, objects could be monoliths or miniatures.

The paint itself is sometimes quite thickly, always deliberately applied. Nash's palette: autumnal greens and browns, cool blue, brick red, muted pinks, rather earnest greys. Straight lines dominate, accentuating conflict between nature and man - sea walls, ordered piles of logs, gates and promenades, frame-like structures incongruously standing atop of hills, perhaps no more incongruous than Neolithic interventions on the landscape like Stonehenge.

I have always tried to keep a distance from autobiographical interpretations of any artist's creative output, as that can exaggerate the linkages between a sensationalist interpretation of any artist's life and their art, fetishising Van Gogh's mental illness is the big example of that. So I don't know whether the unsettling/unsettled quality I see in Nash's work is over-reading. Being a painter myself and recently taking a pretty good look at my own mental health, I can see how intrinsic one's sense of mental well-being can be to one's creative side, though not always in ways that invite obvious interpretations.

As to Nash it is accepted that war, death and depression did inform the progression of his work. What I see in that charged unsettled quality brings to mind (rather flippantly I know) the landscape watercolourist Johhny Nice Painter played by Charlie Higson in 'The Fast Show' who would merrily lay out a gentle picture of unmarred rolling hills and woodland, before noticing something dark, seeing in those dark places the bleakness, the despair, the void behind and underneath, shadow taking over the canvas - "Black! Black!". Nash's work at the Dulwich seems to balance at that tipping point. It is as if the canvases are taken away just as Nash is reaching for that tin of black...