Art - Peter Chasseuaud

The area around Ypres, in Flanders, is perfect for growing willow trees, and thousands of these sometimes graceful, sometimes grotesque creatures inhabit the landscape, as they have for centuries. “But it was not a clever place to conduct a trench warfare campaign”, says artist Peter Chasseaud, whose exhibition of acrylic on paper paintings in the Star Gallery is the first stage of an ongoing project using willow trees; not only as a traditional symbol of loss, but also as a symbol for the horror of warfare. “The clay soil holds moisture, so as soon as a trench was dug it would fill with water. The summer and autumn of 1917 was particularly wet; pretty soon the whole battlefield became a quagmire”.
We’re sitting in the gallery, surrounded by 16 of Chasseaud’s haunting paintings. The Lewes-based artist spent several days in March doing fieldwork on the project, trudging around the still-battle-scarred landscape making sketches, taking photographs and writing poems. “Many of the trees have been pollarded, often rather brutally”, he says. “The word ‘pollard’ is derived from the word ‘poll’ meaning head. And the result of this process is often rather grotesque and humanoid”. He points to a series of paintings on the back wall, taken of trees around a German cemetery. “You can see eyes, noses, faces. They reminded me of the etchings of Otto Dix, who served on the Western Front and produced a body of work, Das Krieg, featuring grotesquely mutilated corpses and landscape”. For Chasseaud the First World War has long been an obsession, and he is the author of three books on differing features of the conflict on the Western Front. “The Third Battle of Ypres, otherwise known as Passchendaele, was a classic WW1 battle, nicknamed The Battle of the Mud”, he says.