Like everyone else my current thoughts are continually pulled back to the nightmare that Ukraine has become. Compassion, horror and outrage for the Ukrainians and those who have found welcome in Ukraine has created a thought structure in my head through which everything else must pass for me to know its importance and context.
This week I’ve been using the work of John and Paul Nash with my students. my plan was that they should find inspiration in the geographic familiarity of John’s landscapes – I’m teaching about 20 miles away from Wormingford – and something more surreal and cerebral from Paul. The overview of their work presented by the library books I took into class obviously included their war work too and I couldn’t help but realise that I was seeing these images as if for the first time. A student bought in a Tate catalogue of Aftermath, an exhibition of artists’ responses to experiences of the First World War and as I flicked through looking at different images, I could feel a compassion for the people I was seeing I hadn’t properly felt before and a different understanding too of the artists making the work.
It’s impossible to know at this moment what changes this will bring to my own work, there is only a sense of certainty that there’s mo going back.
