AlanArt

Lately I've been thinking about mud. The Thames has dropped again and I can walk into town with dry feet but the mead is still a proper quagmire. The main reason I've been thinking about mud though is a painting I'm working on. A path runs along the bottom of the wood above Runnymede, and this is my setting, sterile and wintry with the mead, a simple sunlit field, glimpsed through the trees. The whole foreground is awash with mud and fallen leaves, and the sheer quantity of mud around here can't help but remind me of perhaps the ultimate mud painting, Paul Nash's Menin Road.

For those that don't know him, Paul Nash was an English landscape artist obsessed with finding both the sense of a place and playing with the geometry within it. He mostly worked across Southern England and had strong associations with particular places in Sussex, Kent, Oxfordshire and Dorset. He found his clearest voice though as a war artist. During the First World War he was briefly working in the endless mud of Flanders. Here, his precise, middle-class and romantic aesthetic was suddenly smeared with infinite filth, ducked in the putrid water of shell holes, brutalised by industrial death and finally invalided home with a broken bone.

Back in this country he embarked on his paintings, culminating in this epic. It can be seen in the Imperial War Museum in London (although this is currently closed) and is over 3 metres across. 

It takes its power from the collision between Nash's obsession with order and geometry and the location's inescapable chaos. By working on an outrageous scale and then imposing rhythm onto the destruction Nash gives a sense of the dynamism and the vastness of the conflict whilst also helping to define the relentlessness of the narrative that is being played out. Without the rhythm and rhyme among the pockmarks, shell holes and trees the struggling figures would have been completely lost in the setting. As it is, they just about hold their own and the characters and landscape have near equal status. This was the beginning of a strand in Nash's work which developed between the wars and reached a high point in his Second World War work (Totes Meer, Battle of Britain) and showed the landscape as the dominant character in a narrative rather than as a setting for it.

Let us come back to Runnymede and the woods. At the moment, to walk the wet parts is to slither, to trip and to bicker with them. They are an assault on the body and the senses, when at more benign times of year they are a shelter, a larder and a playground. Right now, a simple walk is an adventure. They embody what Nash almost overcame, that a painting is a very limited way of expressing an experience. Although a painting can suggest the fatigue, the mud, the slog and the cold, ultimately it only uses one sense. The Menin Road comes closer than most to transcending this, not by evoking the utterly overwhelming mud but by making it the lead character in a narrative. Nash shows us that a landscape painting is infinitely richer when treated not as a view but a story. Only then can it trick the viewer into filling in the missng senses, only then can a painting make you feel the exhaustion in your legs and the utter weariness of mud.