Shared Experience: Mess Deck
Jack Nichols
Mess Deck
oil on canvas
86.5 x 127.7cm
CWM 19710261-4303
Contemporary art critic Graham McInnes wrote of Nichols’s official war art in 1950:
Groups of sailors in the sick bay, in their hammocks in the foetid below-decks atmosphere of a pitching destroyer, or snatching a few brief moments of leisure in the heat and press of convoy duty: all these convey both the sadness and the ultimate serenity of a scene from Dostoievsky.
Mess deck was the last canvas Nichols completed as an official war artist. Notice how the cup held by the central figure is conveyed by a few lines scratched into the paint.
Paintings
- Telephone exchange
Harold Freedman - Mess Deck
Jack Nichols - Moresby picture show
Charles Bush - Airmen In A Village Pub Yorkshire
Miller Brittain - Canadian Airmen in a Park
Goodridge Roberts - You'll Get Used To It
T.R. MacDonald - Waterloo Station
Colin Colahan - The fairground, Sydney 1944
Herbert Badham - Soldiers Bathing
Will Ogilvie - V.E. Day Street Party, 1945
Edwin La Dell