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On-line Papers
Paul Gough
‘Exactitude is truth’: representing
the British military through commissioned artworks
Journal of War and Culture Studies
Vol. 1 No.3, pp.341-356, 5 colour illustrations, 2008
Abstract
The work of ‘regimental artists’
is often derided for being jingoistic, irrelevant and predicated
on anachronistic representational strategies rooted in high-Victorian
battle painting. Despite their marginal status, a core of professional
painters today work regularly for the British armed services to
record, and occasionally commemorate, contemporary and past feats
of arms, as well as more mundane public service duties such as ceremonial
display and ‘Keeping the Army in the
Public Eye’ (KAPE) tours.
Their work is largely unseen by the non-military public, largely
because it is intended for a closed community of serving soldiers,
their families, and veterans who are associated with the unit. Yet,
as a sizeable contemporary body of art work, it contributes to the
commemorative rhetoric of the British military and employs a number
of artists of national standing.
Drawing on the author’s own experiences as a several-times
commissioned military artist, this paper is a ‘work-in-progress’
that examines the work of several painters - John Ross, Ken Howard,
and Keith Holmes - who have worked intermittently for the British
armed services in the past three decades. But the paper will takes
as its principle working case-study the work of painter David Rowlands,
commissioned in the 1990s by the Permanent Joint Headquarters (UK)
as their official artist to record the British build-up in the Arabian
Gulf, and since then fully employed by units in the British army
(and some overseas military units) to paint commemorative works
related to active service overseas, largely in Iraq and more recently
Afghanistan.
Through an examination of Rowlands’ work, the paper touches
upon the formal language of military painting, particularly the
tensions between illustration and interpretation, between factual
and technical accuracy, and examines the issues of authenticity
and historical verity.
The paper also touches upon issues of agency and reception, and
the stresses between the commissioning process, the independence
of the artist as interpreter, and broader concerns of testimony
and visual authority.
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