Did you ever play that children’s game that involves walking down the street without ever stepping on the cracks between the paving slabs? If so, I bet you know the rhyme that goes with it:
If you step on a nick
You’ll marry a brick
And bears will come to your wedding.
I’m now trying to avoid stepping on “artistic nicks”. With the windows project largely behind me (at least, for the moment) I’m getting back to the one I set aside, namely, the task of making some artistic response to my experience of visiting, last summer, the site of the First World War front line between Italian and Austrian troops, in north-eastern Italy. Discovering that the trenches had run along the crests of precipitous limestone mountain ridges, and not through Flanders mud, was a dramatic experience. The alpine scenery I had come to associate with happy escape from the care of routine, in the company of amiable companions, was cast in a new light, characterised by imprisonment within a fearful situation, and struggle to the death against a ferocious and alien enemy. I’m still wrestling with exactly how to handle the images brought to mind in that setting, although there are plenty of ideas swirling around in my head.
The problem is, however, how to “avoid stepping on the nicks” and turn my response into something it should never aspire to be. The biggest of these is the need to avoid seeing myself as some kind of “war artist”. Unlike people such as Nash and Nevinson, or Moore and Spencer, I was not there observing the experience of war directly. I have to report my own experience and respond to it.
Not long ago I visited the current exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, dealing with the First World War. One of the interesting things about that first-rate show was the inclusion of both British and German material. It brought home to me the extent to which the war artist is normally committed, even if minimally, to telling the story of one side. The second “nick” to be avoided is the temptation to become partisan. To do so would be unbelievably artificial. I am neither an Italian nor an Austrian, so what would be the point of appointing myself an honorary one?
Maybe there are others. I’m still worried about the bears.