War Art

The BBC News "In Pictures" section is currently featuring some of the work of Michael Fay, a U.S. Marine and official "Combat Artist". He's been to Afghanistan and Iraq and created sketches, paintings and sculptures depicting what he's seen there. Whatever views we each hold about those particular combat zones and the presence of America within them, the fact that there are stories there that need to be told is something which we cannot deny. Acts of creative witness are fundamentally necessary.

I have kept a picture by the World War I artist C.R.W. Nevinson by my computer for the past eight years or so - "Bursting Shell", created in 1915. It's an inspiration. It gives me something to think about. It shows a rainbow star of colour and disjointed fragments of trench supports looming out of the dark, trying to represent something terrifying yet strangely beautiful. There is a vast body of war art by Nevinson, most of which does not see the light of day very often. A few years ago the Imperial War Museum in London put on a retrospective of his work. He also painted a series of studies of industrial Britain in a construction boom, with cranes and tower blocks. Out of the march of progress, the emergence of mechanised warfare and the sheer out-of-controlness of what humans can do to each other and the world around them, he found something that he felt he could document in art. Work like his, and that of Michael Fay, adds a powerful dimension to our collective memory. It enriches and illuminates the key aspects of history that we absolutely must reflect upon and that we certainly must never forget.

Michael Fay "In Pictures"