Teenage Wasteland

The morning after Nash’s Menin Road, wasted landscape.

Andy Farr

Acrylic on canvas, 2014

Nash’s painting Menin Road depicts a section of the Ypres Salient, showing the maze of flooded trenches and shell craters . Tree stumps, devoid of any foliage, point towards a sky full of clouds and plumes of smoke bisected by shafts of sunlight resembling gun barrels.

The battle around Ypres lasted as long as the war itself. This appalling blood-bath was for the Commonwealth troops an endless carnage in a marshy landscape where the wounded were swallowed up in the mud.

Andy Farr’s painting takes Nash’s vision and introduces a group of contemporary teenagers strewn across the landscape. Dead, or sleeping? The muddy aftermath of a festival?

The figures are based on sixth form drama students at Trinity School, Leamington.

"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 for ever. Feeble, inarticulate, will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth, and may it burn their lousy souls."

Paul Nash

"We gingerly crossed the valley of Paddebeek through a hail of bullets, hiding behind the foliage of black poplar trees felled in the bombardment, and using their trunks as bridges.

From time to time one of us disappeared up to their waist in the mud, and if our comrades had not come to their rescue, holding out their rifle butt, they would certainly have gone under. We ran along the rims of the shell-holes as if we were on the thin edge of a honeycomb. Traces of blood on the surface of some heavy shell-holes told us that several men had already been swallowed up."

Menin Road, Paul Nash, 1919, IWM