Thoughts on David Nash

The Yorkshire Sculpture Park is located in a wonderfully bucolic setting on the outskirts of Wakefield. The design of the Park dates back 200 years - it is beautiful and vast. I visited the Park a couple of weeks ago with the Lancashire Artists' Network to see the David Nash exhibition, which is on display through February 2011. Before the visit, I wasn't greatly familiar with Nash's work. Luckily for me, the exhibition is stuffed to the gills with his work and provided me with a robust overview of his repetoire. I immediately fell in love with the works and I had to ask myself why. Several weeks ago I had posted two blogs about Picasso and Yves Klein after seeing their work during my visit to the Tate Liverpool. I have a great deal of respect and appreciation for both artists, yet my response was critical and while I was standing in front of David Nash's piece titled "Charred Cross Egg," I had to ask myself why I was so enamoured with this piece, yet critical of the work of two artists I admire.
Nash works predominantly with wood, both living and dead. Interested in maintaining the integrity of the material, he opts to use natural methods when adding color to dead wood or shaping live wood. Organic and ominous, his forms immediately demand your attention. I think it would be difficult for anyone to face a David Nash sculpture and simply turn away; it requires contemplation. It invades your space in a way that's both confrontational and very subtle. It reminded me of Richard Serra's work in the way you are required to interact with it. And maybe that's part of why I responded to it in the way I did; his sculptures are inviting. It was almost like being introduced to a someone - a stranger who is somehow familiar - and having them invite you in to their house to have a conversation. I had a difficult time walking away.

I pondered the familiarity of Nash's work - intriguing given this was my first time experiencing it. I realized it was because his work brought to mind that of other artists I like; his designs were often reminiscent to that of Isamu Noguchi and Henry Moore; his choice to work with and manipulate natural materials reminded me of Andy Goldsworthy. There was a section of the exhibition that focused on works he completed as a response to the tragedy of 9-11. These works were grim - bold marks in black and gray spoke to the heaviness of the event, yet the grace of the line succeeded in capturing the ironic beauty present in the face of such horrific destruction (as a side note, I recall watching a program several years after the event that talked about that very issue; during the program a woman recounted a story of how she and her 9 year old son were watching the events unfold on t.v.; her son remarked on the beauty of the clouds rising from the towers - he couldn't look away.). The confidence of Nash's linework made me think of the architect portrayed in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead and the same confidence with which he laid down his marks.
Even after writing all of these contemplations, I still don't know if I could definitively pinpoint what it is about David Nash's work that I respond so positively to. I would love to have something succinct to wrap it up, but I think the artist does it best. Here's a quote from the exhibition I jotted down in my sketchbook.

"I learned with these constructions about something developing its own logic that the viewer can enter into. It could have been an integrity and truth that one could feel. And also how a worked object developed its own scale - how it could go beyond the material, go beyond the colour, to have a sense of its own scale which the beholder entered into, which is actually different from its physical scale." (David Nash on his piece from 1967 titled "Archway")