War Art with Eddie Redmayne

Film directed by Margy Kinmoth

Screening at The Drill Hall, Lower Church Street, Chepstow

Thursday October 19 7.30pm

Tickets £10 online at www.drillhallchepstow.co.uk

or at the door on the night from 6.45pm

In support of MonLife Heritage Museums

In association with the exhibition at Chepstow Museum, Discovering Hidden Herstories, the Red Cross nurses who worked at Gwy House Hospital Chepstow in World War I, MonLife Heritage Museums will be staging a number of events this year and next.

The first to be held also in the lead up to Remembrance Day, is a film on War Art which will be screened at the Drill Hall Chepstow on Thursday October 19 at 7.30pm.

In this compelling film Oscar winning actor Eddie Redmayne takes an intensely emotional journey to shine a powerful light into the abyss of warfare, where War Artists have left a unique legacy. As an actor his preparation for his role in the dramatization of the Great War novel Birdsong might have been qualification enough, but he also read art history at Cambridge, so he brings to the role of presenter some deep and perceptive insights.

Says Redmayne “You try and imagine what it was like to be living like that, to be on the ground. But with that period I have always found it impossible – not photography, nor accounts could really ever capture that horror. But for me it was the Art and all sides of that Art, people trying to depict the undepictable that perhaps came closest.”

The First World War had more serving artists than any other war in history. Redmayne explores the iconic canvasses of the Great War – Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer, John Singer Sargent and Henry Tonks, as well as the modernists C.R.W. Nevinson and David Bomberg. Redmayne travels behind the scenes to see war art hidden away from public view – some censored, some never seen on film before. He also explores how artists’ inventiveness played a part in battle, with the innovative dazzle camouflage for shipping to confuse German submarines – and here women played a part –  we see images of young women from the Royal Academy Schools, preparing the designs which were then applied in the wartime shipyards, (which included Chepstow)

Redmayne meets historians and soldiers and travels to battlefield locations as well as visiting artists studios to meet contemporary war artists to see how this art form is as vital now as it ever was, including George Butler (Syria) and Graeme Lothian (Afghanistan), reportage artist Julia Midgley and official war artist Peter Howson (Bosnia), whose work was censored.

This post is also available in: Welsh