That's what they seemed to say to me and soon, just hours later, I was back with a favourite poem, the World War I poem, Exposure by Wilfred Owen - a searing account of soldiers being killed by the 'nothing happens' and the winter weather of war, not by fighting, and of being shut out even of the warmth of memories of home.
Here is a link to it. Not only is it a very moving and thought-provoking poem, but Owen's hugely creative use of language is marvellous.
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/exposure-2/
I was particularly fixated on the final stanza, with the finality of the fingers of frost working on the soldiers with the inevitable result:
To-night, His frost will fasten on this mud and us,
Shrivelling many hands, puckering foreheads crisp.
The burying-party, picks and shovels in their shaking grasp,
Pause over half-known faces. All their eyes are ice,
But nothing happens.
So as this was what had wormed its way out of my head, I rather rashly decided to depict the early-morning frosted faces of the soldiers who had died in the night on the battlefield, not of their wounds, but of the cold.
First of all I used my gelli plate to create the blues and greys of a frosty morning landscape. Then I used simple adigraf cut-outs to create some blasted, blackened trees and jabbed on some lines with paint dipped in the edge of an old credit card to give a sense of fences and wires. Then I used some adigraf mask shapes to indicate the stricken soldiers and finally I made free with silvery and glittery paint to suggest frost.
Well in fact finally I added the last verse of the poem. It's hard to read, but it's important to me that the horror of it isn't ducked.
