Wartime experience has always yielded vividly evocative pictures – and some of the most unforgettable images of the first world war remain the works of British artist Paul Nash. Devastatingly brutal, eerily beautiful paintings such as The Menin Road and Spring In The Trenches, Ridge Wood, 1917 stemmed from Nash’s personal experience: he signed up as a soldier aged 25 and, after being wounded, returned to the front as an official war painter. As part of 14-18 NOW’s programme to mark the centenary of the first world war, Nash’s life and wartime legacy have inspired Black Dog, a major new graphic novel and multimedia show from British illustrator, film-maker and musician Dave McKean.
“I’m not a great expert on the first world war, but I have always loved Paul Nash’s work,” says McKean, whose previous celebrated projects have included legendary comic book series such as The Sandman, a radical reinvention of Batman for graphic novel Arkham Asylum, and The Rolling Stones’ Voodoo Lounge imagery. “When you go to the source, you suddenly see the power of it all. The most interesting aspect is how war changes you; not the military tactics or politics, but what it does to a human soul,” he says.
“Nash went into the war as a romantic symbolist, and came out much harder and more formed as a painter. He was never actually great at drawing the human form, but he put bones and flesh into his landscapes and somehow he managed to crystallise the war experience much better than others.”
Nash made his feelings about the horrors of conflict intensely clear, both visually and through his writing, never more so than in this excerpt from a 1917 letter to his wife: “I am no longer an artist, interested and curious, I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on forever. Feeble, inarticulate will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth, and may it burn their lousy souls.”
For Black Dog, McKean illustrates scenes that flesh out Nash’s life, including poignant flashbacks to the painter’s schooldays, and his family dynamics. “Nash had a complete breakdown after the war,” explains McKean. “He was in a coma for a while.” Throughout, the graphic novel plays on the theme of dreams and the subconscious to explore how Nash would have developed the images he put to canvas, and where he might have taken them next.
McKean also has a long-standing fascination with the revolutionary artistic zeitgeist of the war period and its aftermath. “A lot of the movements that happened around that time, such as Surrealism and the harsh, cutting shapes of Vorticism, are sometimes seen as styles you could imitate,” he says. “But for Nash, this was a genuine thing; he was on a battlefield, and he saw surrealism – the bodies, trees and mud had mutated in front of his eyes. It was burned into his mind.”
The florid, nightmarish, yet alluring visuals merge McKean’s distinctive hand with elements of Nash’s painting style. “There is a bit of Nash in me anyway,” he admits with a laugh. While McKean has previously collaborated with such disparate writers as Grant Morrison, Neil Gaiman and Richard Dawkins, he has created Black Dog’s text by combining various sources: “I’ve taken a few direct quotes from Nash, some digestive ideas, and conversations from actual soldiers’ experiences, and scratch-mixed it all a bit.”
McKean’s experience as a musician comes into play, too, as Black Dog is also being presented as a multi-media performance, blending song, prose and dialogue with the graphic novel’s images. Following its recent premiere at Kendal Town Hall, it returns to the Lakes Comic Festival on 15 October.
Like all of the 14-18 NOW commissions, this is a relevant contemporary statement as much as a powerful commemoration of the first world war. “There’s a direct link between what society was forced to confront and what some people have to endure now,” says McKean. “Art is an empathy machine – and a little empathy in the world could go a long way.”
Dave McKean, House Of Illustration, London, 13 July; Black Dog Multimedia Performance, Lakes International Comic Festival, 15 October. See 1418now.org.uk
