Forty Years Later Than Planned

Yours truly at the corner of Haight and Ashbury Streets in San Francisco

For all of last week, and up to Wednesday of this week, I was in San Francisco. The first week was spent with my MFA in Illustration class. We met a ton of great artists and were treated to a tour of the Lucasfilm studios located aboard the former Presidio military base. Some of the artists who gave us talks and interacted with were Bill Russell, Chuck S. Pyle, Courtney Granner, Craig Frazier, Dennis Zieminski, Lou Brooks, Noah Kiosek, Vivienne Flesher, and Robert Hunt

I also got to finally meet my agent, Katie Boyle, and my co-author, Don DeNevi.

But the big event was finally making it, after forty long years, to the corner of Haight and Ashbury Streets, ground zero of my high school years' dreams of being a hippie. Strange irony then, that on the same day of this photo, I was featured on Fox and Friends, and interviewed about a series of mine called Still in the Fight featured last week by the New York Times. I was also interviewed on Minnesota Public Radio (eat your heart out Garrison Keeler) and had the drawings and articles reviewed in Great Britain's Guardian Newspaper.

Not a bad week after forty years.

A Worthy Cause

I want to thank all the Guardian and New York Times readers who are stopping by. Here's an organization that you may want to donate to. Sew Much Comfort. The 500 plus volunteer seamstresses have made over 90,000 custom made articles of clothes since 2004 for our recovering service members.

Welcome to Guardian Readers

In The Shadow of the Poppy Harvest, oil on canvas, 2011

I want to thank all the readers of the Guardian for stopping by. I hope you take the time to check out my other art and ramblings. Cheers!

Welcome to Opinionator Readers

To all the readers of the New York Times Opinionator website, welcome. I hope you'll take the time to go back through my postings since my tour to Iraq in 2005. You'll find some personal rants, battlefield reports and general musings from my time in both the studio and out in combat.

Wounded Warriors

Corporal Zachary Stinson

Lance Corporal Kyle Carpenter

Lance Corporal Tyler Huffman

Last Thursday and Friday, fellow war artist Richard Johnson and myself, visited with and sketched battle wounded Marines recovering at McGuire Veterans Administration Hospital in Richmond, Virginia. For two days we followed three Marines as they relaxed with family and friends, and endured sessions of painful physical therapy.

Only one word is adequate to describe these young men....Courageous.

In his poem Invictus, William Ernest Henley put it perfectly:

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

You can see Richard's work and read about our visit at Canada's National Post.

Gone Too Long

Sorry for being gone for so long. Since my last posting in September I got married. I'll post pictures very shortly of Janis and my wedding at the National Museum of the Marine Corps this past 10/10/10.

I've been very busy with a number of projects. Other than being a newly wed, my number one priority is my Masters of Fine Arts in Illustration program with the University of Hartford. Here's one of my projects, an interpretation of a Collier's magazine cover in the style of J. C. Leyendecker. A fellow MFA student is originally from Russia, and assures me I could have gotten a job of doing Lenin paintings full time.

I've also been working on a set of oil paintings for the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation based on my trip to Afghanistan last June. Myself and fellow war artist Richard Johnson, are planning a trip back to cover the Marines in Helmand Province during the month of April. The New York Times Opinionator website is going to carry my art, photos and dispatches again. Richard's work will appear in the National Post of Canada.

In the Shadow of the Opium Harvest, Helmand.

Here's one of my oil paintings in progress. The title is going to be "In the Shadow of the Opium Harvest". It shows a Marine dog handler and his dog resting in the shade at high noon next to a pile of dried poppy stalks. During my June trip to Helmand Province, the Marines were being rocketed all day. The rockets were Chinese, new and freshly purchased with opium profits.

The Grenadier.....Finished

Here's the first finished casting of The Grenadier. The sculpture is based on a photograph I took of a Lance Corporal Turchich during Operation Steel Curtain in November of 2005. The piece was created using a technique called ecorche. I built a wire armature, added the bones and then the muscles with plasticine clay to create a flayed man. The flayed man was then wrapped in a skin of plaster of paris cloth. The resulting naked figure was then fully fleshed out and geared up using sculptor's wax. Once this was all complete and the figure married to a small vinyette depicting a blasted concrete pillar, the foundry cast a series of molds. These molds were then used to produce a series of hollow waxes. Each wax was then re-tooled by me to bring back or add details. Finally, the waxes were prepped for and underwent the "lost wax" bronze casting process. And, viola, you have the first version of this, my third attempt at sculpture.

The figure is shown with a pomegranate in his right hand and his helmet in his left. Across his chest an M-16 rifle with an M204 grenade launcher hangs on a three point sling. On his back hangs an AT-4 rocket. At the grenadier's feet lies a branch blasted off a pomegranate tree and scattered leaves, and spent rifle and grenade casings.

The word for grenade originated from the word for pomegranate. The gardens in Iraq and Afghanistan are always filled with them.

Norman Rockwell Museum Talk

Last Thursday evening I gave a talk at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass. It was such an honor for me to be invited to both speak and to contribute to their permanent collection. I took one of my sculptures, The 240 Gulf Machine Gunner, and the photo shows it standing before one of Norman Rockwell's great paintings.

Invitation to the Norman Rockwell Museum

The Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass. has invited me to speak there next Thursday at 5:30 PM. I hope if any of you live within easy driving distance you'll attend.

Today's Motivation

Poem penned by Hamlin Garland and found written on the wall of Marine combat Observation Post Karma

Columnist Mark Shield's piece about the Marines and our values appeared in newspapers across the country today. It's a good read, especially the boot camp part.

A half a century ago, I spent the longest 13 weeks of my life at an out-of-the-way place called Parris Island, S.C., then and now the home of the Marine Corps Recruit Depot.

We were strangers who arrived there in the middle of the night and were immediately relieved of all our civilian clothing and possessions — including our hair. Standing there confused, apprehensive and bald, I remember asking myself over and over: What the hell am I doing here?

Then silently appeared in our midst a man in a starched uniform and polished boots brimming with self-confidence and a sense of command. This was the Marine drill instructor, the DI, who did not conceal his disgust with what he saw in us. I can still hear him that we were the sorriest collection of misfits and rejects he or anyone else had ever seen.

What followed was 90 days of splendid misery. Civilian habits, speech and attitude were marched and drilled and driven out of us. The DI was relentlessly democratic. He treated everyone on our platoon, 189, with equal contempt while double-timing us 12 hours a day from mess duty to the rifle range and back. He used his personal term of endearment to remind us, "Maggot, remember, you volunteered to be here."

Somehow after more than three months of no Cokes, no beer, no TV and not even a day off, the DI, by then our Ultimate Authority Figure, reluctantly conceded that just possibly, maybe someday, we might actually be Marines. The combination of joy, relief and pride was unmatched.

I was not a great Marine. I never saw combat. I got a lot more from the Marines than the Marines got from me. But I believe fervently that this nation today needs the values of the Marine Corps as much as the nation needs the Marine Corps.

Of course, honor, courage and commitment are always in short supply. But the Marines teach personal responsibility and accountability by example, that any chain is only as strong as the weakest individual link. As a unit, we are stronger working together than the individual members can separately be.

Marines take care of their own — and they take care of their fellow Marines before themselves. The well-being of the country and of the Corps is more important than our individual well-being.
This may best be stated in the hard-and-fast Marine rule: "Officers eat last." The Marine officer does not eat until after his subordinates for whom he is responsible — the corporals and privates — have been fed. Marines live by the rule that loyalty goes both up and down the chain of command. Would not our country be a more just and human place if the brass of Wall Street and Washington and executive suites believed that "officers eat last"?

The Marine ethic emphasizes responsibility to duty and responsibility to others before self. This is the very opposite of the unbridled individualism that elevates profit and personal comfort to high virtues. The selfish and self-centered CEO or senator who disregards and discards his loyal "troops" would be shunned in the Corps.

Civilian Americans must understand that the greatest civil rights victories have been won by the Marines and the U.S. military, the most successfully integrated sector of our national life. Why? No racial reference and no racial discrimination. The first time I ever slept in the same quarters with African-Americans or Latinos — or took orders from them — was as a private in the Marines Corps.

Yes, America really does need more Marine values and influence.

I want to echo Mr. Shields with a photograph I took at OP Karma back in June. The words you see in the photo are written on the back wall of one of the most dangerous places in the world.