Join us for the Friends of St Bride Library’s special winter event –a unique chance to hear talks by leading experts on Paul Nash, followed by mince pies & wine and an opportunity to buy books and and prints from fine press publishers.
Nash’s paintings of both world wars are iconic. His landscapes express a profound sense of place and show an artist wrestling with the challenge of being a British artist drawn to the modern movement.
Part of the fascination of Nash’s life is the range of people he knew and corresponded with, making him a significant linking figure in the art of his time, apart from the achievement of his own work. Alan Powers will discuss Nash’s relationships with the poet Gordon Bottomley, the writer Lance Sieveking, and other writers, artists and cultural entrepreneurs of the period, as seen through letters and memoirs.
Alan Powers is Professor of Architecture and Cultural History at the University of Greenwich. He curated the exhibition Eric Ravilious: imagined realities at the Imperial War Museum in 2003, and is the author of ‘The making of High Street’ in The story of High Street (Mainstone Press, 2008).
This talk will look at Paul Nash’s work as a wood-engraver. As well as producing standalone prints, Nash illustrated books and designed commercial work which produced some of his most experimental and abstract images.
Brian Webb is a designer, visiting Professor at the University of the Arts, London and Past President of the Chartered Society of Designers. He has designed and produced several books on British design, including Edward Bawden’s London, in collaboration with Peyton Skipwith, published by the V&A (2011). He curated and designed Edward Bawden in the Middle East, an exhibition and accompanying book, for the Fry Gallery, Saffron Walden (2008) and contributed ‘The Roller Coaster Ride, 1945 to present’ to London Transport posters, a century of art and design (2008).
Nash’s Dorset with Betjeman’s Devon and Piper’s Oxfordshire were a radical new approach to the idea of a Guide Book. Nash’s guide in particular reflected the emergent desire of the aesthete Metropolitan to use the English countryside as a source of spiritual identity and renewal that has a new currency in the Glastofarian 21st Century. This talk will look at Nash’s seminal guide as the first guide to ‘creatives’ England.
Dr David Heathcote is a cultural historian. He is a tutor at Middlesex University and the RCA. and also a writer, curator and broadcaster. His series Art Deco Icons was recently shown on BBC4 and his book A Shell eye on England: the Shell county guides 1934–84 was published this year. He is currently working on a travel book about the history of roads and a project for a National Park in Essex, The hundred parishes.
An artist of intense imagination who possessed a highly-developed sense of place, Paul Nash spent his career seeking in the outside world subjects that fit his inner vision. Focusing on a selection of seminal paintings, this talk draws on correspondence, photographs and original research to explore the relationship between place and imagination.
Writer and historian James Russell is the author of Paul Nash in Pictures: Landscape and Dream (Mainstone Press, 2011), the first of two volumes celebrating the life and work of this important and underrated 20th century artist, and of several other books on social history, culture and landscape. These include the ‘Ravilious in Pictures’ series published by the Mainstone Press.
Read the whole page again, read the page text, skip to a site-wide section or skip to the navigation for this section