After Nash, Before Collapse: Why I Paint Landscapes Anyway by The New Futurist

The canon is heavy. Paul Nash. Graham Sutherland. John Piper. Men who tore up the land with vision and myth and trauma, then stitched it back together in oil and paper. They had ruins. They had war. They had spiritual grief carved into the hills.

What the hell do I have?

Scrolls. Algorithms. ADHD. Mass produced gouache. Climate panic. Noise. So much noise.

It would be easy to call landscape painting dead. To say it’s all been done. That the ghosts of Nash and Sutherland already planted flags in every abstract tree and rolling wreckage. But I paint landscapes anyway.

Not because I think I can do it better.

Because I know I can do it now.

The Weight of History

Let’s not pretend they didn’t master it. Nash’s fractured skies and half-remembered places. Sutherland’s twisted forms and sacred decay. They captured the land at its most broken, during war and aftermath. Their landscapes weren’t quiet pastoral scenes—they were documents of psychic wreckage. Of a country clawing at itself.

I’m not here to compete with that.

But I’m also not here to pretend we’re not in the middle of our own war.

The Landscape Now

The land doesn’t look like it used to. It’s pixelated. Filtered. Drained. Everything’s fast, synthetic, designed to be swiped past. We don’t walk through landscapes now. We scroll through them.

But the violence is still there—it’s just less honest. Less visual. We’ve got climate collapse, post-industrial rot, luxury apartments where factories used to be. We’ve got neon sunsets over vape shops and sun-scorched retail parks. We’ve got nature, but only through the lens of nostalgia or catastrophe.

So when I paint landscapes, I paint that.

I paint the present. Even when it feels like it’s already a ruin.

A Neo-Futurist Response

My work lives in the tension between the real and the abstract. Between the ground and the grid. I work with gouache—real pigment, real paper, real mess—because I want to physically fight the smoothness of digital life. I tape the borders. I build the surface. I confront the silence of traditional landscape with bursts of fractured light and colour.

I call it Neo-Futurist. Not in reference to the avant-garde past of Futurism—but as a reclaiming of momentum. A response to collapse. A refusal to stay still.

The land is still moving, still falling apart. So I move with it.

Confronting the Canon

I don’t avoid Nash or Sutherland. I haunt them. I borrow their ghosts, their shapes, their ways of seeing. But I don’t worship them. Reverence is a trap. And tradition should be used like a crowbar, not a bible.

This isn’t about imitating the past. It’s about dragging its bones into the present and making it walk again.

Why It Still Matters

Because we need witnesses. Not just photographers or drone operators. Not just influencers with a view. Witnesses. People who sit with the land, observe its glitches, its scars, its quiet mutiny.

Painting landscapes in 2025 isn’t about beauty.

It’s about proof.

That you were there. That it was real. That someone noticed before it burned.

So yeah—maybe Nash did it better.

But Nash never had to deal with the digital rot of relevance. He didn’t have to fight through Saatchi’s algorithm or mass produced paint made for classrooms. He didn’t have to document the end of the Anthropocene with a brush and a diagnosis.

I do.

So I paint landscapes anyway.