We are creating a new world

Mediums: oil, canvas.
Location: The collection of the Imperial War Museum, London (the UK).

Briefly about the painting:

As an eyewitness, Nash made a drawing with ink, which he called “Sunrise: Inverness Copse”. It was a place of the hard battle of the summer of 1917 – the Battle of Langemark. A year later, the artist turned the sketches into a painting, giving it a different name, the bitter irony of which is understandable at the first glance at the burnt-out ground and the skeletons of the trees. There are no figures or any distracting details – the artist clearly mocks the ambitions of the war, which offered only devastation that could be anywhere, and not just on the Western Front. The sun is a cold white ball, and the clouds are brown. Their original geometric pattern can be taken for the blood-red mountains. One contemporary critic, who wrote about the painting in 1994, compared its plot with the “nuclear winter”.