Soldiers 1918

Laszlo Mednyanszky built up this image with strokes of muted oranges and greens, like a memory half-recalled. The scene emerges, shifts, through intuition. You can almost feel Mednyanszky’s presence, thinking, ‘how do I evoke this?’ I sympathise with the artist here, imagining what it might have been like for him to create this. It’s like he's wrestling with the subject, the weight of conflict. See how the brushstrokes drag, they aren't blended, and the paint is quite thin. It's like he's trying to find the essence of the experience, rather than depicting it realistically. The way the soldiers are almost camouflaged into the landscape speaks to the emotional tenor of the time, that feeling of being lost in a sea of uncertainty. Artists are always in conversation, riffing off one another, and here, you get a sense of art history echoing through time, a shared vocabulary of mark-making that transcends individual expression. Painting is an embodied expression, an embracing of ambiguity, and uncertainty, which allows for multiple interpretations.