I, whimsically perhaps, thought that going to the Tate's Paul Nash exhibition might be a good preparation for last Friday's Defra meeting and the discussion of the government's grand 25-year post-Brexit plan for the environment. Whilst the Defra event was never going to be unspeakable and godless as Nash remarked of WW I, at times it felt pretty hopeless, an adjective he also used.
Nash, was something of a nature painter, particularly of trees. The Tate show certainly does his treescapes justice with paintings from throughout his career, most memorably with his blasted battlefield images from Flanders, particularly, I suppose The Menin Road and We are Making a new World. The Tate devoted the first and last rooms of the exhibition to pictures that feature landscape with woods and trees, created at both ends of a painting life: from Dreaming Trees to Equinox.
In between there was much too much surrealism and explorations of the unconscious for my liking. In that it was rather like the Defra meeting which I commented on yesterday. The exceptions to surreal overload were some of the World War Two images of wrecked German aircraft. One of these is his achingly beautiful watercolour Bomber in the Corn from 1940. But this was far too magnificent an image for comfort, and the link to the Tate website (above) does not do it any sort of justice.
But back to Defra. The mere idea of a 25-year plan for anything these days is to invite ridicule, but a lot of people at the Defra meeting last week took it seriously. I didn't, and I may not have been alone, although I think that too many present were there just to stake their claim to be the key agency for Defra to work with on all this.
This link is the best I can find about what the plan might entail. Whatever it is, has had to be revised, however, as it seems that the Brexit vote caught everyone at Defra on the hop. The part of the plan we were supposed to be discussing was the Connecting People with the Environment strand, and I'll say more about this in a day or so.
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