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A Cross in Flanders
2011
67cm x 48cm
Paper, acrylic paint, pencil and cord
At Passchendaele and Ypres, when I went there, quite literally, I was lost for words.
Owen, Graves, Sassoon and Brooke et al had already said it all – they were there at the time, and at the Somme and other places, I was only an interested party who arrived on a bus, a visitor for a day, so many decades later.
It was the topography that got to me, that oppressive, unrelenting terrain, that eventually had the upper hand.
And the serried ranks of chiselled, stone memorials, innumerable, far too many to even begin to count.
Each one signifying a life lost in the mud and the mayhem.
It brought to mind Stanley Spencer’s, although very different - poignant, powerful and poetic tangle of crosses in his Resurrection of the Soldiers, from that same War.
So, mine is just a single cross, left to speak for itself.
George Taylor
April 2026
George Taylor Website - Gallery 8
