Black Dog: The Dreams of Paul Nash @ Rugby
Time & Location
About the Event
Pre-Show Events Included in Ticket
Exhibition by Dave McKean
6.00-7.30pm
The Lewis Gallery, Rugby School
WW1 original artefacts
6.00-7.30pm
Memorial Chapel, Rugby School
£15 Adults, £5 Children
‘I am no longer an artist. I am a messenger who will bring back word... to those who want the war to go on forever. It will have a bitter truth, and may it burn their lousy souls.’
- Paul Nash, writing home from the front line
The painter Paul Nash joined the British army when he was 25 years old, signing up six weeks after the start of the First World War. The appalling experiences he endured, first as a soldier and later as an official war artist, prompted him to create paintings of disturbing, lasting power. Nash’s paintings inspired major new work by Dave McKean, the highly acclaimed illustrator, filmmaker and musician.
A live-staging of his new graphic novel of the same name, the concert performance, brought to us by Dave McKean, features projections, animated illustrations, live music and narration and is a uniquely original exploration of the life, imagination and ‘dreams’ of the artist Paul Nash.
Dave McKean has previously collaborated with figures as diverse as Neil Gaiman, Richard Dawkins and Heston Blumenthal. In May 2016, McKean’s response to Nash’s work was issued as a special limited-edition book before being published as a graphic novel in October at the Lakes International Comic Art Festival. Black Dog launched with a series of multimedia performances, with text, images and music performed by McKean and friends.
“I’d like to explore Paul Nash’s role in the birth of modernism and surrealism, and how those movements were actually witnessed by Nash in the dream-/nightmare-like battlefields of the war. He used the landscape that he loved to try to deal with what he’d been through, and to try and find calm and solace beyond.”
- Dave McKean