Landscape of the Vernal Equinox

Today is the spring equinox. The world is vertical relative to it's orbit around the sun and day and night are exactly 12 hours long. Given which tradition I see myself fitting into, given which artists I like, given my fascination with the rhythms of the seasons there is only one post I could possibly do today: Here is Paul Nash's Landscape of the Vernal Equinox.

There's a lot of intriguing stuff going on here. Half the painting is given over to the night and the moon, the other to the day and the sun. Most of the daylight is about the solid ground beneath our feet; the world made tangible. Most of the moonlight is about the sky, an inaccessible realm of dreams; the world made ethereal. Meanwhile the twin hills that are the Wittenham Clumps are divided, one preserved for us in daylight, one given to the night. As Tom Lubbock wrote, Paul Nash reveals that "we live in a changeling world." Never is that more apparent than in this painting, and never is it a more appropriate observation than at equinox or solstice.