A couple of years ago I suffered a breakdown, but it brought me back to art-from every negative comes a positive. Throughout my convalescence I learnt glass engraving, paper, and reed work and have decided to start painting again.
My son once made a causal remark on how the veins of a leaf engraved on glass reminded him of WWl aerial photographs. His comment piqued my interest, and following this I decided to explore this tumultuous time through my work.
My art became heavily influenced by war, and I have since thrown myself into producing several pieces using multiple mediums like a person possessed. I became immersed. The 'Section de Camouflage' was a system of disguise established by the French army in 1914 which included camouflage trees, cramped observation posts designed to mimic natural flora. A tree which was growing in a good observation point would be recreated using steel and tarpaulin in the back lines. The false tree would replace the original under the cover of darkness. This caught my imagination, and I made a short tree trunk from paper clay with ghostly faded pictures of soldiers looking out from cracks in the 'bark'. The whole thing was wrapped in paper barbed wire.
I created further pieces from papier mache and acrylic paint, depicting the bomb damage on the ground from aerial photographs of the Somme and other areas. It made me think how scarred the ground was and still is, which led me on to my next two pieces, 'Scars' and 'Explosion'.
Scars depicts the senseless waste of life, of men going 'over the top' and of war in general. A red diagonal slash across the canvas is piled up either side with hundreds of toy soldiers, each painted black and wrapped in their own individual black paper shroud, their form only just distinguished, their faces forgotten.
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