Merry Christmas!

Recon Hill by Charles Grow This is pen and ink work at its very best.

Emergency Medical Center by Peter Michael Gish Colonel Gish's watercolors are as good as anything Sargent ever did.

Mockup for Leatherneck magazine Halloween issue during WWII by Tom Lovell

Corporal Duff Chapman by John McDermott That young/old look etched on the face of a Marine on Okinawa

"Straggler" by Donald Dickson WWII Marine on Guadalcanal

"Country Slim" Guillory by Ben Long

Captain James K. Hall by Henry Casselli Drawn from life after an intense night of combat in Vietnam

The past three weeks have found me working on the initial "to do" checklist for a museum show of my work slated for next summer. On December 4th I met with Brian Peterson, the head curator for the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. The Michener Museum is world renown for its collection of Pennsylvania Impressionist paintings, and the creations of internationally recognized woodworker George Nakashima. The Pennsylvania School of Impressionism is also known as the Bucks County, and the New Hope Schools. The exhibit will be July 7th thru October 21, 2007. I hope many of you living in the Mid-Atlantic region will get a chance to see the show. Doylestown, New Hope and nearby Lambertville, NJ make for a great romantic weekend trip.

The show will feature a cross section of pieces from my four deployments over the last five years. At the suggestion of Mr. Peterson we're also including a selection of works by other combat artists from the Marine Corps Combat Art Collection that have been an inspiration to me. The images I'm posting today are a few of the pieces that have deeply influenced my work.

Sergeant Kris Battles continues to post some wonderful images and commentary over at his blog Sketchpad Warrior. Please go over, give his work a gander and leave him a nice Christmas greeting.

Mortarmen at Haditha....Finished

"Danger Close" Oil on canvas, 20x16

The title of this finished oil painting is "Danger Close". Danger close is a phrase used when friendlies are dropping things that go boom, whether 2000 pounders or 81mm mortar rounds, just about on top of your position. The tube of this gun is as vertical as it can get, and what goes up must come down.......in this case very close.

The past couple weeks I've steered clear of ranting about the present state of affairs engendered by the recent mid-term elections. Like alot of you I'm more than a little burned out with the current state of politics in the world....especially in the Western World. Victor Davis Hanson hits every nail on the head with his recent commentary Losing the Enlightenment.

I doubt if Hanson reads Fire and Ice, but he eloquently touched on virtually every situation that has set my teeth on edge since 9/11 with regards to the so-called liberal progressive left, the greatest benefactors of Western Civilization. He speaks of their rampant complacency and self-loathing, the malaise of perfectionism, the inability to confront evil as evil, and the basic ignorance of how our collective bread gets buttered in the first place. Please go and read this piece!

Sergeant Kris Battles has just returned from an extended time out in the "goo" and has made a lengthy entry (with art to follow) over at his blog Sketchpad Warrior. You can also view and listen to Sergeant Battles talk about his experiences at a site called Ends of the Earth Productions.