Intimations of infinity

Andrew Lambirth finds a striking metaphor for the physical limitations of earthbound existence versus the infinite freedom of the spirit in Paul Nash’s painting ‘Winter Sea’

Paul Nash is one of the best-loved English painters of the last century, a great imaginative artist, always trying to discover the appropriate form for what he wanted to say. Nash was a philosopher-poet who expressed himself best (though he was a good writer) in visual terms and chose landscape painting as his primary vehicle. Although he died prematurely, in 1946 at the age of 57, his work stands easily above that of most of his contemporaries, and its originality and inventiveness have continued to inspire painters and beguile the public. He saw nature as a creative mystery and painting as a way of offering insight into it. The act of making a painting was for him essentially twofold: an emotional response to a subject and a process of solving visual equations between shapes. He tended to paint elemental forms distilled from nature rather than any kind of more rigorous abstraction. Nature was much more than textbook geometry.

Nash preferred painting trees to people and his landscapes are usually empty though pregnant with mysterious possibilities. His places are temporarily deserted, as if the inhabitants had just that moment exited our field of vision. He did not depict the natural world topographically, from the outside, as the plein-air realist might draw it, sitting on an old stump and attempting to describe the surroundings. Nash painted from within, the artist making a kind of mystical identification with the landscape, offering an insider’s interpretation and thus proposing a different order of relationship with the viewer. Nash had a vision to communicate rather than visual facts. He wanted his audience to feel for themselves the importance and relevance of what he was painting.