Olive Mudie-Cooke

Olive Mudie-Cooke painted poignant scenes of wounded soldiers and battlegrounds during the first World War. Although academically trained as an artist, Mudie-Cooke was a volunteer nurse and an ambulance driver during the war, promoting her emotional portraits of the scenes she witnessed. When she did not directly subject wounded figures, she produced images of desolate landscapes that served as a haunting reminder of the battles the spaces once saw. Her dull, subdued color palette is tantamount to the bleak nature of her subject matter and her sketchy, non-exacting paint handling marks her as a modernist.