The Boy Who Drew Soldiers

Michael D. Fay

UHA ID: 10202138

Master of Fine Arts in Illustration University of Hartford

ILS 970

Thesis Defense and Exhibition

Naturalist to Imagist: The Boy Who Drew Soldiers

Special Thanks

To my wife, Sergeant First Class Janis M. Albuquerque, for her invaluable intellectual and technical assistance despite being away at war on the other side of the world.

To my editor, Mrs. Nancy Moore, former managing editor of the Fredericksburg Free-Lance Star, for her superlative feedback and timely review of my written material. Naturalist to Imagist: The Boy Who Drew Soldiers

Table of Contents

Introduction Page 1

Inspiration Page 10

Process Page 51

The Works Page 74

Marketing Page 88

Program Page 92

Conclusion Page 94

Biography Page 95

Bibliography Page 97

For all intents and purposes, this thesis is a “reaction paper” about me. You’ll read where I’ve come from personally and artistically, where I am now as a result of this program, and where I hope to go with this thesis and a career as an illustrator with an invaluable MFA. You will also learn about a novella-in-progress and see how personal experience, behavioral psychology, and historic and artistic precedence inform thesis illustrations. The title of this thesis, Naturalist to Imagist: The Boy Who Drew Soldiers, joins two components related by a core theme of empathy. The first part of the title refers to the impact this program has had on my art. I’ve learned new skills and a fresh attitude about the nature of picture-making. The second part is the title of a self-authored rite-of-passage novella. The two elements capture the inter- relatedness of my growth as an artist in the University of Hartford’s Limited Residency Master of Fine Arts in Illustration program, and show how the material in the novella is deeply informed by my time at war. This thesis will return again and again to three words—naturalist, imagist and empathy, so it would be well to give working definitions at the outset. A naturalist is an artist working in the tradition of 19th century French Naturalism. Naturalism, as seen in painter Jules-Alexis Muenier’s (1863-1942) Young Peasant Taking His Horse to a Watering Hole (Fig. 1), while often utilizing impressionistic techniques, avoids romantic idealization or an overt narrative, and exercises a minimum of visual editorializing. On the other hand, an imagist, exemplified by the American illustrator Maxfield Parrish (1870-1976), primarily draws upon internal vision in the creation pieces like The Lantern Bearers (Fig.3). The naturalist objectively observes and records without completely distilling away personal style. The imagist’s creative presence saturates the work, and the rules governing the physics of the world take a back seat to imagination. Imagists like Parrish are theatrical directors overseeing everything from plot, sets and costumes to the casting of actors. The naturalist is an extrovert; his creative source is primarily external reality. Conversely, the imagist is an introvert, drawing inspiration from inner material and imagination. Naturalists and imagists share a common denominator in the use of photographic 1 reference (Figs.2 and 4). The naturalists used photography as an aide-memoire, while for imagists like Parrish, known for his use of a system called Dynamic Symmetry, it is a means to design pictures for calculated effect.

Fig.1 Jules-Alexis Muenier, Young Peasant Taking Fig.2 Jules-Alexis Muenier, Preliminary photograph for Young Peasant His Horse to a Watering Hole, 1891, oil on canvas. Taking His Horse to a Watering Hole, 1891, from glass negative.

Fig.3 Maxfield Parrish, The Lantern Bearers, 1908 Fig.4 Maxfield Parrish, Preliminary photograph oil on canvas. for The Lantern Bearers.

Empathy comes from the Greek for feeling, ‘pathos’. Pathos has generated a family of words used to describe our emotions in relationship to others, objects, ideas and even to ourselves. All of us at one time or another have felt strongly against someone, antipathy; cared little to nothing for something, apathy; or even found ourselves weeping with someone we hardly knew, sympathy. The word empathy, a relatively modern word coined in 1909 by English psychologist Edward B. Titchener (1867-1927), means to “feel into”. Unlike its close relatives—sympathy, “to feel with” and apathy, “to feel not,” empathy is a way of knowing, neither divorcing oneself from feelings nor wallowing in them but rather

2 staying in the tension between them. Empathy is a mature relationship with emotions and takes time, experiences and conscious choice to develop. Empathy lies at the heart of The Boy Who Drew Soldiers storyline and influenced my transformational “naturalist to imagist” experience in this program. If we forego the litmus test of “how will it look reproduced,”Italian Renaissance artist Michelangelo Buonarroti’s (1475-1564) Sistine Chapel Ceiling frescoes (Fig.5) can easily be seen as one of greatest pieces of graphic illustration. Michelangelo subscribed to the Renaissance maxim “Ogni dipintore dipinge se”—every painter paints himself. This paper will bear this out. Whether in the selection of objective material or referencing subjective influences, this thesis is as much a personal testament as a body of illustrations for a rite-of-passage novella about a World War I British soldier. Consequently, there will be honest and direct references to personal experiences as they relate to thesis illustrations and changes in attitude about the practice of illustration.

Fig.5 Michelangelo Buonarroti, Sistine Chapel Ceiling, 1508-1512, fresco.

I spent twenty-eight years of my working life as a United States Marine. During that time I did nine combat tours; eight in uniform and one as a retired Marine embedded as a free-lance correspondent for the Canada’s National Post and The New York Times. I joined the Marines in 1975 an insufferable romantic, a talented artist without discipline, and a three-time college dropout with a penchant for double rum and Cokes. I was in desperate need of a path into adulthood. The drill instructors at the Marine Corps’ Parris Island boot camp demanded everything, tolerated nothing and gave me no choice other than to finally grow up. The Marines allowed me to not only grow up, but to grow out. My career as a Marine flies in the face of stereotypes about military service. An initial enlistment as an infantryman specializing in mortars was followed by tours as a double-entry bookkeeper, aviation electrician, helicopter air crewman, and recruiter. I rose through the enlisted ranks to gunnery sergeant and retired as a chief warrant officer. For my final decade in the Marines I was appointed the official combat artist for the National Museum of

3 the Marine Corps. My job was simple and direct; go to war and do art. Paradoxically, the Marines, an organization legendary for no-nonsense practicality, allowed me to finally realize what it meant to be a full-time artist. The Marines had not only shown me the world, but more importantly, myself and how to realize my potential. Those years as a Marine have given me a retirement, a circle of close friends, professional accolades as one of a handful of working war artists, a mature worldly outlook and a ninety per cent Veterans Administration disability rating. I have chronic post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This thesis’ illustrations are informed by content drawn from experiences in combat and PTSD therapy.

Fig.6 Howard Pyle, The Battle of Bunker Hill, 1897, oil on canvas.

Fig.7 Michael Fay (b.1953), The Siege of Boston, n d, pencil on paper.

Fig.8 Michael Fay, Detail from The Siege of Boston.

Before becoming a Marine, I was a boy who drew soldiers. A lot. By the age of four I knew I wanted to be an artist. Inspired by visits to battlefields in and around my father’s hometown of Boston and Howard Pyle’s (1853-1911) painting The Battle of Bunker Hill (Fig.6), I drew imagined Revolutionary War combat (Figs.7 and 8). Other wars followed. I would sketch everything from Romans fighting barbarians (Fig.9), coonskin capped Texans defending the Alamo (Fig.10), doughboys advancing across no man’s land (Fig.11), GIs dodging explosions while fighting the Nazis (Fig.12), and even soldiers of the future (Fig.13). My drawings of war were a source of both consternation and pride for my parents. There was agreement I had native talent. A friend of my parents, artist and teacher Mitzi Denitz (b.1929), pointed out six-year-olds normally don’t draw overlapping sails and lines of foreshortened soldiers with the level of detail in my interpretation of the British invasion of Boston in 1775. The acknowledgment of my ability was matched by a lack of consensus over whether to encourage it. I have little doubt, were I an elementary student today with the same predilection to draw soldiers, I’d be given an obsessive compulsive disorder diagnosis and medicated.

Fig.9 Michael Fay, Romans and Barbarians, n d, pencil on paper. Fig.10 Michael Fay, The Alamo, n d, pencil on paper.

Fig.11 Michael Fay, Doughboys, n d, pencil on paper. Fig.12 Michael Fay, Battle of the Bulge, n d, marker on paper.

Fig.13 Michael Fay, Soldier of the Future, n d, pencil on paper.

My early art teachers clearly saw a calling, while my less sure parents feared a curse. Teachers submitted my art to competitions, like those sponsored by Hallmark Cards, and I would win. Parents, though proud of the recognition, would bemoan the mountains of paper wasted on imaginary warriors and battles. After knowing poverty during the Great Depression and enduring World War II, what they knew of art came from Hollywood and the tabloids. Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) (Fig.14) had cut his ear off in an absinthe haze before shooting himself, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) (Fig.15) died an addicted syphilitic, and Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) (Fig.16) ended a day splashing paint on canvases impregnated with smashed whiskey bottle glass dead in an alcohol sodden car wreck. It would be more than forty years before my love-hate relationship with art would be reconciled. This conflicted dynamic, art as both blessing and curse, is a subtext explored in this paper and a theme running through The Boy Who Drew Soldiers.

Fig.14 Vincent van Gogh, Self Portrait With Fig.15 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, At Grenelle, Bandaged Ear, 1889, oil on canvas. Absinthe Drinker, 1887, oil on canvas.

Fig.16 Jackson Pollock, Blue Poles: Number 11, 1952, 1952, enamel and aluminum paint with glass on canvas.

During a five-year hiatus from the Marines, 1978-1983, I earned a Bachelor of Science in Art Education from the Pennsylvania State University. As an art educator I became aware of art as a contributor to a general curriculum and a player in achieving cognitive growth goals. The work of pioneering French developmental psychologist Jean Piaget (1896-1980) was central in selecting the primary theme of empathy for my novella, The Boy Who Drew Soldiers. In matters more directly related to childhood art, I will also discuss the writings of Richard Jolley (b.1964), a British psychologist deeply interested in the nature of children and their drawings. In the Marketing chapter I’ll talk about how I plan on appealing to educators with material integrating historical, cognitive and art education curriculum goals. Due to international exposure generated by several British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) documentaries and interviews about my combat art over the past decade, I was contacted by the great- nephew of a WWI British soldier-artist, the great-grandson of one of England’s greatest war artists, and a photographer who’s a member of one of Great Britain’s most notable, albeit unusual regiments. As a

7 consequence, you will learn about Private Len Smith’s (1891-1974) wartime memoir, Drawing Fire: The Diary of a Great War Soldier and Artist, war artist Sir Muirhead Bone (1876-1953), and the First Battalion, Twenty-Eighth Regiment of the County of London, otherwise known as the Artists Rifles (Fig.17). Each of these serendipitous meetings gave rise to major elements in the Inspiration and Process chapters.

Fig.17 Leonard Charles Wyon (1826-1891), Artists Rifles Emblem, 1860, brass cap badge.

On July 17, 2010, my combat art was the subject of an article in The New York Times’ Sunday Arts and Leisure section, and in short order the Smithsonian National Museum of American History’s Military and Diplomatic Collection approached me about my work. The NMAH is the collection of record for the body of work created by the official U.S. Army WWI war art program. As a result of this relationship I’ve been allowed to view and photograph the artwork produced by Harvey Dunn (1884- 1952)(Fig.18) during his time on the Western Front. For most of us our vision of WWI is informed by black-and-white photographs. In both Inspiration and Process chapters I’ll discuss how his color choices, and that of British war artists, inform my illustrations.

Fig.18 Harvey Dunn, German Advance Stopped at Belleau Wood, 1918, oil on canvas.

In researching both narrative and visual content I’ve been led into amazing discoveries. Wanting to creatively expand into staging reference photos led to embedding with the WWI re-enactor community. After learning about an Italian photographer who stages toy military action figures I started building miniature sets and experimenting with lighting techniques. Research into the war art of all combatant nations in WWI, I have read raw first-person accounts of life in the trenches. The anecdotal information in these memoirs, especially those written and illustrated by official British war artists, combined with re-enactment experiences, has provided inspiration for everything from color choices to plot elements.

Inspiration, like empathy, has an interesting origin. It comes from the Latin, “inspirare”; to breathe into. What follows is a comprehensive look at a very deep in-breath. Influences and experiences brought to this program will be related to the content and techniques learned in Hartford Art School’s (HAS) classes, and discovered during thesis research. In this chapter you will read about personal and artistic inspirations, and the sources of specific conceptual and visual material for The Boy Who Drew Soldiers’ storyline, character development and illustrations. The Process and Works chapters could be combined and titled Exhalation—together they’re the outbreath of inhaling more deeply than I would have, left to my own devices. The original ‘dream project’ for this MFA was a series of bas-relief sculptures inspired by five combat tours during the first ten years of the Global War on Terrorism, and the artistic precedent set by the U.S. Navy Memorial Plaza in Washington, DC (Figs.21 and 22). The project failed program director Murray Tinkelman’s (b.1933) illustration litmus test—“How will it look reproduced?” I also suspect Tinkelman and my faculty advisor Bill Thomson (b.1963), with decades of teaching and mentoring illustrators, are sensitive to student attempts to find easier softer ways of doing things. This is would be true in my case.

Fig.21 Leo C. Irrera (b.1927), U.S. Navy Memorial, 1987. Fig.22 Stanley Bleifeld (1925- 2001) The Lone Sailor, 1987, bronze.

For most of my professional life I’ve resisted the title “illustrator”. While the official combat artist for the Marines, when interviewed by the media or queried by fellow servicemembers about my work, I always took exception if called a combat illustrator. Call me a painter (Fig.23), call me a sculptor (Fig.24), but please do not confuse what I do with the world of illustration. With this attitude it’s small wonder my first proposal was a project barely passing the illustration sniff test.

Fig.23 Michael Fay (b.1953), All Eyes Down, 2002, oil on canvas. Fig.24 Michael Fay, The Grenadier, 2009, bronze.

In hindsight, I realize a softening of my negativity towards the word illustrator had started long before setting foot on the University of Hartford campus the summer of 2010. In 2006, while vanity- Googling on the Internet, I found myself featured by a German academic organization, The Melton Prior Institute for Reportage Drawing, and the website 100 Years of American Illustration and Design. In 2007 and 2009 I participated in symposiums sponsored by the New York School of Visual Arts (SVA), and made friends with Francis DiTommaso (b.1953), SVA’s director of exhibitions. DiTommaso, knowing my career as a Marine was coming to a close, aware of my art and having seen me present to SVA students, encouraged me to think about teaching at the college level. Knowing this would require a terminal degree, he recommended the SVA MFA program overseen by famed illustrator Marshall Arisman (b.1938); Illustration as Visual Essay. DiTommaso, now a good friend, gently but firmly told me I was an illustrator and “illustration as visual essay” described my war art. Convinced, I arranged a meeting and traveled in January of 2010 to New York City to interview with Arisman. The meeting went in an unforeseen direction. Rather than accepting me into his program, Arisman had me immediately phone his close friend Tinkelman, and two hours later I was accepted into this program.

I anticipated a relatively easy check-in-the-box experience where, as a military retiree, I could leisurely pursue a fine arts sculpture project relatively unmolested—with the added benefit of a MFA degree. The first two weeks of this program, while exhilarating, eliminated use of the word “easy” with respect to completing a thesis in a low residency program. After having my initial bas-relief sculptural project rejected at the November 2010 residency in New York City, I knew I would have to reach deep to satisfy this program’s expectations. Happily, the disappointment in having a first thesis proposal go down in flames was short lived. The baby hadn’t been thrown out with the bathwater. This program has an entrepreneurial focus encouraging us to define our “brand”. I’m a working war artist and closely identified with the intersection of war and culture. Thomson encouraged me to think about the middle-school book market and the potential for a fresh illustrated work with a realistic take on war. With this, my thesis expanded exponentially; I would not only need to create illustrations, but come up with a compelling and historically valid story as well. I investigated the books middle-school curriculums rely on with respect to war. The only work regularly used that deals forthrightly with combat is Stephen Crane’s (1871-1900) Red Badge of Courage. Anne Frank’s (1929-1945) diary, while set in war time, deals with civilians and the Holocaust, and All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque (1898-1970) is more applicable to high school curriculums. I remember in early adolescence reading a Classic Illustrated Comics version of The Red Badge of Courage and being deeply moved by the 1930 film adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front starring Lew Ayers (1908-1996). The image in the comic book where The Youth discovers a rotting soldier abandoned in a forest (Fig.25) and the crater scene between Ayers’ character and the dying French poilu he’s just stabbed (Fig.26) are alive in this thesis. The former inspired me to call my main character ‘The Boy’ and the latter to have the arch of the narrative leading to an encounter between him and a German soldier in a crater in the middle of no man’s land. Back at square one, two things immediately came together—a book, Drawing Fire: The Diary of Great War Soldier and Artist, and a title for the new project, The Boy Who Drew Soldiers. I had originally become aware of Drawing Fire in 2008, after engaging in a correspondence with Dave Mason (b.1946), the great-nephew of the diary’s author. Having discovered the manuscript among family papers, Mason worked tirelessly for years to get his great uncle’s book in print. The great uncle, Private Len Smith (1891-1974) (Fig.27), had a successful post-war career as a commercial artist and in the early 1970s formatted his diary as a book but failed to find a publisher. He passed away never seeing it in print.

Fig.25 Unknown, Cells from The Red Badge of Courage, Fig.26 Still from the motion picture All Quiet on the Western Classic Illustrated Comic #98, 1952. Front, Universal Studios, 1930.

Mason originally made it available as an on-line e-book. With exposure on the BBC, attention by major British newspapers, discussions in military related on-line chat rooms, and subscription activity on the Internet site, the diary finally attracted a major publisher, HarperCollins (Fig.28). It turns out, though long dead, Smith was taking full advantage of modern marketing techniques and social networking.

Fig.27 Unknown photographer, Private Len Smith, Fig.28 James Annal (?), Cover for Drawing Fire, 1914, photograph. 2009, HarperCollins Publishers.

Although certified as an art teacher, my actual public school experience was in special education. From 1999 to 2000, as a teacher of emotionally disturbed students in a middle school, I tried

13 to integrate art into the curriculum for my caseload of twelve very problematic adolescents. One effective resource was a video, The Boy Who Drew Cats. Most of these students had obsessive- compulsive disorders, and this adaptation of a Japanese folktale addressed it in a positive and novel way. Based on a legend about an actual Japanese boy artist, Sesshu Toyo (1420-1506) (Fig.29), David Johnson’s (b.1951) (Fig.30) illustrated retelling was turned into a video narrated by the actor William Hurt (b.1950). The story is deceptively simple. A boy with an obsession for drawing cats is abandoned by his parents at a Shinto temple during a time of famine—a famine whose cause is rumored to be a mysterious beast. The boy is further rejected by the temple priest and later a blacksmith. He eventually satisfies The Hero With a Thousand Faces author Joseph Campbell’s (1904-1987) criteria for a hero as “someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself” by ending the famine. Alone for one final night in an abandoned temple, he can draw as many cats as he wishes on the walls, floors and furniture. He wakes to find his cats now have bloody paws and mouths. During the night they had magically come to life and slain the rat-like demon ravaging the land. For me, this folktale’s resolution of the “blessing or curse” question often associated with an artistic calling is profound. He finds his place in the world by staying true to himself. Being at home in your own skin, like standing in the shoes of another, was a lesson not only my emotionally disturbed students needed to learn, but myself as well. I now had a title, The Boy Who Drew Soldiers, a solid branding idea for marketing and way to invest personal material into a fictional story with historic grounding. The book’s overarching theme would come from research into the target audience, the middle-school student. According to the writings of developmental psychologist Piaget, eight-to twelve-year-olds are passing through the cognitive stage of “concrete operations.” During this phase our thinking becomes more adult-like, or

Fig.29 Sesshu Toyo, Self Portrait, 1491, Fig.30 David Johnson, The Boy Who Drew Cats, Ink and wash on paper. 1995, watercolor on paper, cover art for 2007 ABDO Publishing Company library bound edition.

14 what Piaget calls “operational.” Of the qualities developing in this stage, the one that resonated most deeply was empathy—when our rigid childhood egocentricity starts to relax even as our ability to think abstractly explodes. We can begin standing in someone else’s shoes and comprehend worlds beyond our own. The basic elements of art, war and adolescent development of empathy further coalesced around remembering something remarkable I had read around the age of twelve. My father, a WWII veteran, had in his library a British WWI memoir, Old Soldiers Never Die by Frank Richards (1883-1961). Richards’ actual name was Francis Phillip Woodruff, and his memoir is considered the finest penned by an enlisted man in the Great War. Richards had managed to fight from day one in August of 1914 to the final armistice in November 1918. In the pages of this book I found perhaps the most remarkable occurrence in any war, The Christmas Truce of 1914. On Christmas Day 1914, WWI virtually stopped as British, French and German troops poured out of their trenches and met in no-man’s land to share the day (Fig.31). Setting my tween market novella’s theme of empathy with a young fictional soldier-artist in the trenches of WWI was now set. Reading multiple memoirs I would learn the lack of enmity between common soldiers on opposing sides of the Great War was the rule and not the exception. While I didn’t elect to create a story directly inspired by the 1914 Christmas Truce as Gary Kelley (b.1945) (Fig.32) did for J. Patrick Lewis’ (?) And the Soldiers Sang; it, along with the life of Private Smith, is the inspiration for choosing WWI and the British army as my book’s setting.

Fig.31 Photographer unknown, photograph appeared Fig.32 Gary Kelley, title unknown, 2011, pastel on paper, on the front page of the London newspaper The Daily illustration appears in And the Soldiers Sang written by Mirror on January 5, 1915. J. Patrick Lewis.

What artistic influences followed me into this program? Ironically, with every professional artist presenting to us, and with the research and writing of each new reaction paper, I realized the artists inspiring them since childhood were mine—illustrators all. Mad Magazine’s Jack Davis’ (b.1924) poster for the television series Get Smart (Fig.33) had been on my bedroom wall the day I left for boot camp in 1975, and Mort Drucker’s (b.1929) spoof of Star Trek in Mad Magazine is still one of funniest ever done (Fig.34). Robert Crumb’s (b.1943) Mr. Natural (Fig.35) and Charles E. Schulz’s (1922-2000) philosophical everykid Charlie Brown (Fig.36) and Joe Kubert’s (b.1926) Sergeant Rock (Fig.37) were the stuff of my childhood and adolescent visual memories. In 2008 I had a dream come true spending a day with Joe Kubert at his school in Demarest, New Jersey (Fig.38).

Fig.33 Jack Davis, Get Smart, 1965, mixed media, Fig.34 Mort Drucker, Star Blecch, 1967, pen and poster commissioned by NBC to promote Get Smart ink, illustration for piece in Mad Magazine issue television series. #155 December 1967 by Dick DeBartolo (b.1945)

Fig.35 Robert Crumb, Mr. Natural, 1971, Fig.36 Charles E. Schulz, untitled, mixed media, cover art for Mr. Natural #2. n d, pen and ink.

Fig.37 Joe Kubert, Sergeant Rock, 2010, pen and ink.

In the pages of Crocket Johnson’s (1906-1975) Harold and the Purple Crayon (Fig.39) I learned early the power of a single line to create a whole reality. For many Baby Boomers the book intellectually dividing childhood from adolescence is Norman Juster’s (b.1929) The Phantom Tollbooth with illustrations by Jules Feiffer (b.1929). I remember hours spent trying to draw the characters Tock and Milo (Fig.40). But nothing can hold a candle to one of the first books I ever purchased, a used bookstore copy of Otto of the Silver Hand by Pyle. In its pages I found exquisite images to fuel my budding teenage romantic illusions (Fig.41). Decades later, the cross-hatching of Feiffer, Pyle and Crumb would be found in my own pieces (Fig.42), along with the dashing line quality of Kubert (Fig.43). Long before I ever entered a college studio, I’d been visually schooled by the finest of American illustrators on the power of imagery when wed to narrative content.

Fig.38 Michael Fay, personal photograph with Joe Kubert, 2008.

Fig.39 Crockett Johnson, illustrated page from Harold Fig.40 Jules Feiffer, Milo and Tock, mixed media, 1960, and the Purple Crayon, 1955, mixed media. illustration from The Phantom Tollbooth.

Fig.41 Howard Pyle, He Took Her Hand and Set It to His Lips, 1888, pen and ink, final illustration in Otto of the Silver Hand.

Fig.42 Michael Fay, Lance Corporal Nicholas G. Ciccone, Fig.43 Michael Fay, Private Reiner Koole, 2005 2002, pencil and ink on paper. pencil and ink on paper.

Once the general concepts for this thesis fell into place, I started down multiple avenues. These paths eventually started to weave back and forth over each other, and the major intersections became the genesis for The Boy Who Drew Soldiers illustrations. Like good detective work, what follows is the result of shoe leather, luck and gut instinct. Some of the paths followed are consistent with my naturalist impulse—reading wartime memoirs, researching period military histories and equipment, and reviewing every available photographic resource on the Internet. Other paths, particularly involvement with the WWI re-enactment sub-culture and staging photo reference material, although echoing actual experience as an embedded combat artist, represent branching into imaginative content and methods. And finally, due in large part to exposure to the techniques of program presenters and faculty, combined with discovering Italian photographer Paolo Ventura’s (b.1968) book War Souvenir and his on-line photo essay, Civil War, I started building, staging, lighting and photographing reference material using one sixth scale military action figures. A new generation of military themed figures had left the G.I. Joes of my childhood in the dust, and I took full advantage of their historical accuracy. Some of my staged shots (Fig.44) involved creating imagined action scenarios in the same spirit as Ventura (Fig.45). In others, as the Italian did (Fig.46) with Mathew Brady’s (1822-1896) photograph of the Second Battle of Fredericksburg (Fig.47), I created reference material based on historical precedent (Fig.48). I was taking my first baby steps as an imagist.

Fig.44 Michael Fay, personal reference photograph, 2012 Fig.45 Paolo Ventura, Turin, 27 April. German Soldiers Barricaded in Building in the Center, 2006, digital photograph.

Fig.46 Mathew Brady, Second Battle of Fredericksburg, Fig.47 Paolo Ventura, untitled, digital photograph, one of six 1863, wet plate photograph. images in a series titled Civil War.

Fig.48 Michael Fay, personal reference photograph, 2012.

The sub-text material in this thesis closest to home draws on PTSD treatment. In 2007, after four combat tours in five years, I was diagnosed with one of three types of PTSD, hyper-vigilance (an anxiety disorder). As a hyper-vigilant my issue relative to this thesis is “disassociation”. Although I can be articulate to the point of verbosity on many issues, I can also be completely lost recognizing and expressing simple emotional states. This is a response to having spent extended periods under the stress of combat, when emotions take a far back seat to action. The prescription for dealing with detachment triggered by stress is simple—identify what I’m feeling quickly and express myself there and then. The method, taught by my primary therapist, Dr. Alex Bory (b.1947), is called FLASH. Each letter stands for a non-negotiable emotion: Fear, Love, Anger, Sadness and Hurt. These five emotions are not open to intellectualization. We can debate whether a situation is worthy of fear, but the felt emotion is always legitimate. In the Process chapter you’ll read how these five emotions are illustrated with respect to The Boy’s experiences. In developing images and a story line focused on empathy I consulted with Bory. He offered three important insights. One, we need an appropriate language of feeling to develop empathy, and FLASH, whether for a veteran dealing with PTSD or an adolescent trying to make sense of a flood of cognitive and hormonal changes, is good common ground to start from. Two, empathy is transitional in nature—so it would be useful to illustrate concepts like “then and now”, use differing physical perspectives as visual metaphors, and show inner and outer psychological states. The third suggestion, in response to seeking advice about illustrating the horror of war was the most intriguing. Bory talked of the relationship of the grotesque and empathy. Things we call grotesque represent a profound departure from what we call normal. The grotesque is the dark side of empathy. However, the grotesque naturally attracts attention and ensures remembering. It can serve as a metaphor for great, often shocking transitions, and therefore has major empathetic potential. I thought of my sharp memories of a green putrefying soldier in The Red Badge of Courage, the cruel amputation of the hand of Pyle’s Otto by a robber baron (Fig.49), and the horrific vision of dismembered hands clinging to barbed wire in All Quiet on the Western Front (Fig.50). My clearest memory of the grotesque in art is an image painted by war artist Tom Lea (1907- 2001). Virtually every picture book of WWII I devoured as a child had a full-page copy of Lea’s painting The Price, a scene he witnessed, the death of a Marine from a mortar blast on the beach at Peleliu (Fig.51). Bory assured me that middle-schoolers can handle the grotesque and validated a necessity for it in my narrative and illustrations.

Fig.49 Howard Pyle, “Then Dost Thou Know Why Fig.50 Still from the motion picture All Quiet on the Western I Am Here?” Said the Baron, 1888, pen and ink, Front,Universal Studios, 1930. illustration appearing on page 93 of Otto of the Silver Hand.

Fig.51 Tom Lea, The Price, 1944, oil on canvas, illustration for Life Magazine.

Having established subtextual concept material, I started researching overt narrative and illustrative content for The Boy Who Drew Soldiers in the work of WWI war artists. This in turn would lead to finding wartime memoirs and diaries rich in anecdotal material about the Western Front. My story is about a British “Tommy,” so I focused primarily on Britain’s war artists. What I learned from their art and first-person battlefield reminiscences could fill a stand-alone book. WWI was a much watched war, but the dominant source of visual information is stark and grainy black and white photographs and herky-jerky silent movies. While period photographic reference material proved very useful, memoirs and war art about the battlefields of France and life in the trenches provided the richest source of information and inspiration. The first British artist I investigated was Sir Muirhead Bone. In 2006, on the heels of being featured on the BBC, I learned about this two-war artist in an email from his grandson. Within days of becoming aware of Bone, I serendipitously found and purchased in an antique shop a complete set of his WWI work. Published and distributed in 1917 by Doubleday, Page & Company, Bone’s war art was packaged in two volumes, each containing multiple folios of art with commentary. Bone was the first official artist fielded by Britain’s War Propaganda Bureau, otherwise known as Wellington House. Wellington House was in an information war with Germany and the prize was the United States of America. Bone’s loose charcoal drawings, some with watercolor washes, were created in-country and reproduced with short commentaries written by Lieutenant Charles E. Montague (1867-1928). Montague had been a journalist and newspaper editor before the war, and although opposed to England’s declaration of war on Germany, he enlisted into the army as a private at the age of forty- seven. The army would eventually make him the chief overseer and censor of journalists on the Western Front, but not before he had already served long months in the trenches rising to the rank of sergeant. The marrying of his prose with Bone’s illustrations proved effective in Britain’s attempts to shape American perception of the war. They would also give me an appetite for images and writings detailing what the Western Front looked like, beyond the limits of photography. Bone’s Ruined Trenches in Mametz Wood (Fig.52), enriched by Montague’s words, provided a punch list of basic items to include in any illustration of the Western Front:

“In this one drawing may be seen the face of all the hard-fought woods of the Somme battlefield—Mametz, Fricourt, Bazentin, Delville, Thiepval, Foureaux and St. Pierre Vaast. Everywhere in them all is the same close network of half-filled trenches, the same bristle of ruined tree trunks, the same of the leavings of prolonged fighting at

close quarters—bits of broken rifles and bayonets, perforated helmets, unexploded hand grenades, fragments of shell, displaced sand-bags, broken stretchers, boots not quite empty, and shreds of uniform and equipment.”

Fig.52 Muirhead Bone, Ruined Trenches in Mametz Wood, 1917, charcoal on paper.

The next artist, William Orpen (1878-1931) proved even more invaluable. His irreverent war memoir, An Onlooker in France, is a treasure trove of images and descriptive insights. Orpen, mentored into the official British war art program by John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), was Sargent’s designated heir apparent for fashionable British high society portraiture. This estranged Irishman, between bouts with the tertiary syphilis that would eventually kill him, boozed his way across the Western Front one step ahead of generals trying to get him permanently returned to England. An alcoholic womanizing dandy in his civilian life, he proved a fearless war artist when at the front. Orpen was deeply moved by the horrors of the trenches and the tough and cheerful Tommies who endured unimaginable deprivations and dangers in them. Just as some of the personal issues he faced, and the pushback from some quarters he experienced as an artist at the front were mine almost a century later. Orpen’s WWI war art also pointed to several avenues I would go down illustrating this thesis. His art covers the gamut from observational naturalism to highly personal watercolors and paintings worthy of any imagist. In the plein-aire painting German Wire, Thiepval (Fig.53), we have a visual essay echoing observations penned by Montague about battlefields strewn with abandoned gear and “white ribbons of chalk and broader 24 rust-brown ribbons of tangled wire standing out clear against the shabby velveteen grey of the heath.” I found myself not only collecting information about the flotsam and jetsam of the front, but background for creating a color palette as well.

Fig.53 William Orpen, German Wire, Thiepval, 1917, oil on canvas.

Orpen’s Changing Billets, Picardy (Fig.54) shows his strength as an imagist, taking a figure from a field sketch (Fig.55), a set of stylized lovers from his imagination, and deftly combining them before a theatrical backdrop to illustrate a facet life at war we wouldn’t otherwise be shown, Orpen draws open the curtain to a small, but common drama using the full range of his art and experiences. The painting is at once personal (Orpen knew he was syphilitic yet never curbed his appetites despite debilitating episodes blamed on “blood poisoning”) and at the same time energized by external source material, the stoic Tommies he idolized. We have in this piece an example of Michelangelo’s claim that every work art is a self-portrait—here is Orpen showing us his dual nature.

Fig.54 William Orpen, Changing Billets, Picardy,1918, pencil Fig.55 William Orpen, A Soldier Resting, the Road to Arras, 1917, pencil on paper.

In addition to recording what he saw in some pieces and what he was feeling in others, Orpen never ignored the horrors, both physical and psychological, of war. In A Skeleton in a Trench (Fig.56) he captures with dry detachment an all-too-common sight soldiers quickly became numb to. His Blown Up, Mad (Fig.57) in the same style and medium, shows a Tommy as miraculously unscathed by an explosion as he’s profoundly undone mentally.

. Fig.56 William Orpen, A Skeleton in a Trench, 1917, Fig.57 William Orpen, Blown Up, Mad, 1917, watercolor and pencil on paper. watercolor and pencil on paper.

In Orpen’s hands the grotesque and its handmaiden, smell, allow us to stand in the shoes of soldiers facing each other across the no man’s land. In his book, A Terrible Beauty: British Artists in the First World War, Professor Paul Gough (b.1958) of the University of West England, says this of Orpen’s work:

“Whereas many artists drew the rough architecture of smashed trenches as a geometric tangle of torn wire and splintered timbers, Orpen drew the land in a state of advanced atrophy, where sandbags ooze earth like pus, parapets seem to melt under the searing light, trenches are reduced to glutinous fatty pulp; it is as if the land has been rendered to molten wax. The sweet odour of death and decay is almost palpable. In these works Orpen painted ‘the smell’.” In his memoir Orpen wrote: “. . .the shell holes with the shapes of bodies showing faintly through the putrid water—all these things made one think terribly of what human beings had been through, and were going through a bit further on, and would be going through for perhaps years more— who knew how many? I remember an officer saying to me, ‘Paint the Somme? I could do it from memory—just a flat horizon-line and mud-holes and water, and stumps of a few battered trees, but one could not paint the smell’.” Gough notes how Orpen’s near discordant color scheme using viridian, scarlet and cobalt, combined with nearly eliminating mid-tones, gave paintings like Dead Germans in a Trench (Fig.58) the atmosphere of disquieting extremes needed to express the presence of the foulest of smells.

Fig.58 William Orpen, Dead Germans in a Trench, 1918, oil on canvas

Orpen’s paintings, many done “en plein aire,” reveal the colors of the war-torn plains of Flanders, the main battle space of the English in Northern France and Belgium. With his paintings and the writings of Montague I had a place to start formulating my palette. The art and writings of Paul Nash (1889-1946)(Fig.59), Christopher R. W. Nevinson (1889-1946)(Fig.60) and Percy Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957)(Fig.61) gave additional inspiration. I learned that everywhere across no man’s land lay patches of brick red—all that was left of pulverized villages. In many places under the topsoil lay great expanses of chalk exposed by shelling, massive underground mine explosions and constant trench digging. Everywhere was a brown expanse of mud peppered with lonely white crosses, briar patches of rusted barbed wire and craters filled with foul yellowish-green water. And, paradoxically, in the absence of normal crops, wild flowers and poppies, encouraged by the constant tilling of the soil by bombardments and fertilization with corpses and chemicals, flourished.

From Orpen’s An Onlooker in France: “The boat was crowded. Khaki, everywhere khaki; khaki clothes, khaki faces, khaki lifebelts, khaki rain and khaki storm. The whole world a soaking wet khaki.” “Never shall I forget my first sight of the Somme in summer-time. I had left it mud, nothing but water, shell-holes and mud—the most gloomy, dreary abomination of desolation the mind could imagine; and now, in the summer of 1917, no words could express the beauty of it. The dreary, dismal mud was baked white and pure—dazzling white. White daises, red poppies and a blue flower, great masses of them, stretched for miles and miles. The sky a pure dark blue, and the whole air, up to a height of about forty feet, thick with white butterflies: your clothes were covered with butterflies.”

From The Fateful Battle Line by Captain Henry Ogle(?):

“In the flashes, against a brilliant emerald-green background, our wet picket posts and wire shine with an even greater brilliance, every barb shedding a glittering succession drops. Glancing to my right I can see the steel helmets and wet groundsheet cloaks of the next pair of sentries standing out in the darkness as though whitewashed.”

Fig.59 Paul Nash, We Are Making a New World, 1918, oil on canvas.

Fig.60 Christopher R. W. Nevinson, The Harvest of Battle, 1919, oil on canvas.

Fig.61 Percy Wyndham Lewis, Battery Shelled, 1919, oil on canvas.

From The Fateful Battle Line by Captain Henry Ogle(?):

From a letter from Paul Nash to his wife:

“Here in the back garden of the trenches it is amazingly beautiful—the mud is dried to a pinky colour and upon the parapet, and through the sandbags even, the green grass pushes up and waves in the breeze, while clots of bright dandelions, clover, thistles and twenty other plants flourish luxuriantly, brilliant growths of bright green against the pink earth.”

From the writings of Charles E. Montague: “A mile and a half from Albert, as you go out north-eastward, you spy in a hollow below you a whitish sprinkling of mixed mud, brick dust and lime, the remains of La Boisselle, on the right of the road. On its left a second grey patch is that of Orvillers.”

From A Frenchman in Khaki by Paul Maze: “Here and there were patches of acid-green grass; the country looked drenched and hopeless.”

From their collective writings and images I now had a clear idea about the colors I would need and how my palette would support the narrative. Viridian green, a color I would normally stay far away from, along with raw umber and Payne’s grey would be key for evoking a world saturated with noxious odors and existential nightmares. Conversely, I also needed to be ready to add unexpected notes of warmth to express the resiliency of nature and the human spirit. Everything about the world of a British Tommy on the Western Front rests with words like khaki, mud, rust, chalk and brick. My palette would rely heavily on umbers, siennas and ochre. For value changes, in addition to Payne’s grey and lamp black, I would use unbleached titanium white. Its warm ecru tone echoed the chalky substrata of much of Flanders and would help unify both discordant and more upbeat content. It would be, in effect, the

30 empathetic bridge of a palette seemingly at odds with itself. I found affirmation for my viridian-green and earth-tone dominated palette unified by ecru in Otto Dix’s War Triptych (Fig.62).

Fig.62 Otto Dix, War Triptych, 1929-1932, oil on canvas.

In Howard Pyle: American Master Rediscovered, an anthology of writings on the father of American illustration, illustrator James Gurney (b.1958) throws light on one of Pyle’s defining techniques—mental projection. Pyle had “the ability to envision unseen worlds through the lens of direct experience.” I knew I wanted to be as exacting as possible when it came to everything about British soldiers in WWI. The naturalist in me had a desire to know everything about their equipment and daily routines. Due in large part to the November 2010 class given by Ted Lewin (b.1935), an appetite to create original photo reference material was whetted. This led to contacting the Great War Association and eventually getting an invitation to embed with one of their re-enactor units, The Guards Division. Many of the members are not only history buffs, but professionals in museums and the National Park Service. They would provide me with the most expert advice possible on equipment, how it was worn and the personal items a Tommy would carry into the trenches (Fig.63). They also agreed to pose for reference shots and allowed me to join them at their re-enacting site in Newville, Pennsylvania. There was one caveat; I would be required to show up in full kit. On three occasions I traveled to the Newville site. Located on a rural tract of land sandwiched between Amish homesteads, the GWA units had created an authentic slice of the Western Front. French, British, Russian, Canadian, Australian and American units faced Germans and Austrians across a no man’s land pockmarked with craters and crisscrossed by bands of jagged barbed wire. Each unit had trenches built to the unique specifications of the armies they represented. German trenches were beautifully engineered with poured concrete pillboxes. The British and French lines depended on sandbags, rusty sheets of corrugated metal and salvaged wood (Fig.64).

Fig.63 Michael Fay, reference photograph, 2011.

Fig.64 Michael Fay, reference photograph, 2011.

Fitted out with a Short Magazine Lee Enfield rifle, Pattern 1908 web equipment, gas mask, Brodie helmet, ammunition boots, puttees and wool uniform gave me a sense of the weight and discomfort a Tommy felt during long hours starring through periscopes into no man’s land. While not going so far as infesting ourselves with the scourge of lice, the rough wool uniforms, with the heat and

32 sweat, produced a convincing level of itching. These re-enactors, once the weekend long events begin, go completely into character. The events are “closed sets”—the public is not invited. From long hours scanning no man’s land through trench periscopes (Fig.65) to firefights (Fig.66), and full frontal assaults (Fig.67) with blank ammunition, improvised grenades and flares—the action equals Hollywood’s best special effects. From these experiences I got great photo references and a visceral appreciation of the trench life The Boy would endure.

Fig.65 Michael Fay, reference photograph, 2011

Fig.66 Michael Fay, reference photograph, 2011

Fig.67 Michael Fay, reference photograph, 2011.

During research on the Internet I came across a website on all things WWI, The Great War in a Different Light (http://www.greatwardifferent.com/Great_War/Copy_index.htm). An obvious labor of love, the site is an exhaustive resource for all things visually related to WWI. Of the many things I was made aware of, the most valuable was the three volumes of La Guerre Raconté par Nos Généraux (The War Told by our Generals). Published entirely in French, these volumes are solely illustrated with war art. I purchased a complete set for my library. Of all the potential visual ideas in their pages, the one I found the most inspiring and would subsequently emulate for this thesis, were wonderfully graphic drop cap illuminations (Figs.68).

Fig.68 Antoine Marie Raynolt (1874-?), woodcut, drop cap illuminated letter L used in three volume set of La Guerre Raconté par Nos Généraux.

What is the story inspiring my illustrations? The Boy Who Soldiers follows the life of The Boy from age seven to twenty-one. Like the character in The Boy Who Drew Cats, he shares characteristics common to a hero’s tale, and like the Japanese folktale, my main character, The Boy, is based in part on an actual historical character. What is the plot of The Boy Who Drew Soldiers, and how does it address the theme of empathy? Developing empathy is as volitional as it is an emergent characteristic of our minds at a certain stage of development. It is something we are more capable of as our brains develop, but more importantly, a quality we have to consciously practice. In very real ways, standing in someone else’s shoes means being discomfited. An empathetic response requires lowering protective ego boundaries and our grip, not only on who we believe others to be, but ourselves as well. The plot of The Boy Who Drew Soldiers, beyond historical material, is informed by the writings of archetypal psychologists Carl Jung (1875-1961) and James Hillman (1926-2011), philosopher Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) and contemporary fiction writer Steven Pressfield (b.1943). These men, from Jung to Pressfield, form a continuum of thought from theory to practical application with respect to the calling to, struggle with and realization of creative potential. With the plot of this book and its illustrations, I hope to connect these same dots in a tale both approachable and the stuff of legend. Jung’s pioneering work on what it psychically means to be human has animated the work of not only psychiatrists and philosophers, but artists and writers as well. His profound revelations about the nature of consciousness I’ve tried to apply to the development of empathy through the very act of drawing. Several of Jung’s insights have helped conceptualize the common ground of art and consciousness, and the drama triggered as they cross paths. I found grounding for this coming-of-age story with a focus on art in this observation by Jung: “When we have passed from childhood to adolescence to adulthood, nature abandons us to the world of consciousness, which is to say, culture.” His insightful take on the question of art as blessing or curse: “ The biblical fall of man presents the dawn of consciousness as curse.” And finally, the conceptual basis for shaping my story as a classic hero’s journey: “it is the growth of consciousness which we must thank for the existence of problems. Problems thus draw us into an orphaned and isolated state where we are abandoned by nature and are driven to consciousness.” I had the basic dots connected— creating art and choosing to be empathetic, even as they rely on native talent and biological development, are also conscious acts of will requiring courage verging on the heroic. Hillman and Campbell, coming from scientific and philosophical perspectives respectively, have explored in their writings the theme of a calling. Hillman, author of The Soul’s Code, believes we are

35 each born with one, what he calls our personal daemon. In light of the “blessing or curse” theme, it is perhaps no surprise this Greek word morphed during the Christian era into demon. Campbell, author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, researched across history and cultures the phenomena of those who stay unflinchingly true to their calling; they often become heroes. In my story I draw on both the mystical implications of Hillman’s daemonic theory and Campbell’s codified The Hero’s Journey. Pressfield, author of The Legend of Bagger Vance, a personal friend and former Marine, has used the material of Jung, Hillman and Campbell in his work and in his own struggles as a writer. In a brutally honest “self-help” book, The War of Art, he articulates what the discomfort of consciousness means to the artistic grunts out in the trenches of creativity. Pressfield says, “Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance. . . As powerful as is our soul’s call to realization, so potent are the forces of Resistance arrayed against us.” This “soul’s call to realization” is what the Romans called genius and the Greeks the daemon, and as Pressfield describes it—“. . . an inner spirit, holy and inviolable, which watches over us, guiding us to our calling.” In his Legend of Bagger Vance a mysterious hobo caddy guides a deeply troubled WWI doughboy back to his true calling, golf. In The War of Art Pressfield gave me the bridge between my character and his dedication to art within the defining experience of war (as it was in my artistic life). He writes; “The warrior and the artist live by the same code of necessity, which dictates that the battle must be fought anew every day.” How does this material specifically impact the story line of The Boy Who Drew Soldiers? Jung talked about “an orphaned and isolated state where we are abandoned by nature and are driven to consciousness.” Campbell, in his analysis of the archetypical hero’s journey, notes that in life and legend heroes are often orphans, marked by an exceptional tragedy at an early age that leads to a quest. My character is orphaned by the death of his father and the emotional breakdown of his mother. The Boy’s father is an engraver for a London newspaper and a member of a County of London territorial regiment, the Artists Rifles (Fig.69). The Territorial regiment system was a unique way England filled its need for a ready pool of soldiers after the Crimean War. The standing British army, unlike its Navy, was quite small. This was especially true at the outset of WWI, where by Christmas 1914 the regular British Expeditionary Force, The Old Contemptibles, had almost ceased to exist. These territorial units were made up of men with common interests, vocations or locale. They designed their own uniforms, trained monthly in a congenial men’s club atmosphere and gathered once a year for joint exercises with the regular forces. The Artists Rifles was founded in 1860 and its first members were a who’s who of Pre- Raphaelite painters. They would be called upon from the earliest days of WWI to fill in the massive

36 gaps left after the regular force of hardened professionals was decimated holding the Germans at Mons and the River Marne during late summer and early fall of 1914.

Fig.69 Artists Rifles War Memorial, Royal Academy of Arts, London.

Called to active service to fight in the Boer War when The Boy is seven, his father is killed in the Siege of Ladysmith. His mother, of ‘sensitive disposition’, soon disappears into a sanitarium and The Boy is sent off to the country to live with his paternal grandfather. The Boy begins a series of experiences where he has to prove himself as an artist while coming to terms with a protagonist bent on derailing his creativity. His first nemesis is his grandfather’s spinster housekeeper, followed by a ne'er-do-well bully at the famous art school, The Slade, and finally, after enlisting in his father’s former regiment to serve on the Western Front, his company’s sergeant major. The Boy doesn’t go through his travails alone. His kindly grandfather, an early member of the Artists Rifles and Zulu War veteran, encourages his native talent even as the housekeeper throws drawings into the fireplace and burdens him with tiring and distracting chores. At art school The Boy has the mentorship of a drawing instructor, the very real historical figure, Henry Tonks (1862-1937), and in the trenches he is mentored and protected by his company commander, Wilfred Owen (1893-1918), the greatest poet of WWI and one-time member of the Artists Rifles. With each problematic scenario The Boy struggles with both external challenges and internal doubts about the pursuit of art. He is talented, yes, but with each step forward art seems to lead him

37 into even more difficult straits, until, like the very real Private Len Smith, he finds himself out in the middle of no man’s land sketching German positions. In the trenches of France The Boy’s art matures, even as his romantic illusions about the glory of war go down in flames. Echoing the example of Private Smith, he provides his buddies with humorous caricatures and small portraits to send home to loved ones. He also sketches everyday life in the muddy hell of Flanders for its own sake. From the horrific sights of bodies on the wire and the freshly wounded being treated, to quieter moments of Tommies writing and reading letters, brewing up tea or attending to the odious task of picking lice off of clothes and skin, little escapes his notice. Life in the rat-infested trenches, knee deep in freezing water, challenged the sanity of every combatant on both sides of no man’s land. For the average British Tommy three things were absolutely essential to keep life bearable—matches to light fires and cigarettes, letters and newspapers from home, and tea. When life was at its very lowest, when they were in the trenches way past promised relief, every bit of wood exhausted for warmth, every cigarette smoked and the last bit of water lying foul in their canteens, they would burn precious letters and newspapers with their last matches to make tea. Another major characteristic of the hero’s journey is “atonement with the father” and this is the basis for The Boy’s initial obsession with drawing soldiers. Often the word atone is interpreted as a form of making up for wrong behavior and asking for forgiveness, but in truth a better interpretation comes from reading the word with a nod to empathy—“at one”ment. The problematic orphaning experience is an existential push onto the path of consciousness, and the first thing he tries to understand, to become one with through drawing, is his father. With each new episode The Boy gains insight into his tormentors, realizing they, like him, have faced the same existential problems. But unlike him, they haven’t moved beyond whatever is generating the animosity they project on him and his art. The housekeeper, fellow art student and sergeant major have been overcome by the Resistance Pressfield talks of, and are haunted by “unlived lives within.” Like The Boy, they’ve known fear, love, anger, sadness and hurt, but their understanding and consciousness have remained limited and the “soul’s call to realization” unheeded. With each of these three characters, The Boy eventually is able, through his art, to offer a way forward. For the housekeeper it is a portrait helping her see herself as something much more than a frumpy spinster trapped in a life of domestic servitude. He encounters the bully student, a new lieutenant, at the front and The Boy gets him to agree to be drawn for his girl back home. In the course of the sketch session the bully opens up about his fears, anger at himself for not being as talented as other students at The

Slade, his love for a young woman, and the sadness he feels each time one of his men is killed. (I myself have experienced many times, out in combat and in the inpatient wards of Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Marines opening up during a sketching session.) In The Boy’s drawing he will see a self revealed beyond the failure he sees in the mirror. The Boy will eventually find himself wounded and desperately ill with trench fever. Private Smith, who was found medically unfit for duty at the front, was sent to a unit of artists in the rear creating camouflage for artillery batteries and observers. My character, once healed, will be assigned to his old drawing instructor, Tonks, now a medical officer overseeing a shop of artists making prosthetic faces. The trenches, despite all the protection they theoretically afforded, also invited a lot of facial wounds. Sandbags, despite how thick they were laid, couldn’t always stop grazing machine gun fire. Tommies, crazed with boredom after days staring at a small patch of sky and a fragment of barbed wired no man’s land, sometimes risked a quick look over the top, only to receive a sniper wound carrying away much of their face. Tonks, a surgeon long before he was an artist and teacher, was pressed into helping give disfigured soldiers some of their humanity back. He would not only design and help fabricate new faces, but he would create amazingly sensitive portraits of the wounded as they progressed through reconstructive surgery (Fig.70). It will be in Tonks’ clinic that The Boy will re-unite with his old sergeant

Fig.70 Henry Tonks, untitled, 1917, pastel on paper Fig.71 Michael Fay, Lance Corporal Kyle Carpenter, USMC, 2011, graphite on watercolor paper.

39 major, now horribly disfigured. He will create for the Old Contemptible a face. The Boy, in the course of working for Tonks, will create a thousand faces for heroes (a play on words with Campbell’s Hero With a Thousand Faces). Having spent time sketching fellow Marines as they go through facial reconstruction, I understand the palliative impact the act of drawing can have (Fig.71). The Boy will come to understand that the old soldier he so despised, the one who demanded that he burn his drawings to make tea for his tired troops, had his own personal crosses to bear. The Boy, who thought the sergeant major was punishing him for not relinquishing his drawings and by sending him out into no man’s land to sketch, now realizes the truth. The old soldier, knowing The Boy’s talent would help save lives, and that the desolation of no man’s land was far safer from daily artillery bombardments, mortar rounds and harassing machine gun fire than the trenches, used him for the good of all concerned. Many territorial units in the early days of WWI were given an old soldier who’d survived the first German onslaught, to train them to the standards needed to endure the harsh realities of the Western Front. The Boy’s sergeant major was one of these, and he now grasps the fact that his former tormentor was his greatest advocate. The sergeant major, in hard and desperate fighting, had lost almost all his friends, and when assigned to a group of weekend warriors, made an oath to save as many of them as possible. When he had demanded the drawings it was only because he knew how badly his men needed a cup of tea to keep their sanity. The sergeant major’s gruff, almost cruel demeanor was to one purpose— make his territorials hate him more than they feared the war and the Boche. The decision to send The Boy out into the ragged wasteland in front of the German line would have an even more profound impact. An encounter in a fresh shell crater in no man’s land and the consequences of this meeting is the place where the narrative arch of The Boy Who Drew Soldiers leads. In this crater the drama of art as blessing or curse and the theme of empathy is played out as two enemies, normally hell bent on killing each other, discover common ground in The Boy’s drawings. With bullets flying overhead and artillery rounds impacting all around them, The Boy and a German on his own reconnaissance make an uneasy truce. There, in the midst of chaos, The Boy shares his sketchbook and the German nods again and again at images triggering recognition, laughter and sadness. Eventually, as night falls, a rescue party comes to find his companion. The German motions him to play dead, and as the German search party leaves, he feels his sketch satchel pulled away. The Boy is devastated. In his sketches are not only personal ones, but valuable reconnaissance drawings, including one which clearly shows a fatal vulnerability in the German line. The Boy, after a hard night of navigating a frightening landscape of water-logged craters and

40 avoiding detection with each new flare illuminating no man’s land, finds his way back to his own trench. Just as the sun rises he collapses with exhaustion, only to be summarily awakened by the stern sergeant major ordering him to report to the battalion headquarters. Panic overwhelms him. Surely they must know he’s lost the valuable intelligence drawings, and there will be a terrible price to pay. Art has undone him. At the headquarters he’s greeted with an unexpected sight, there under a white flag of truce is the German soldier—he’s the major commanding the battalion opposite theirs. In his hands is The Boy’s satchel, still containing all his sketches, to include upon later inspection, the one clearly showing the critical vulnerability in the German line. The Boy would hand those incriminating drawings to the sergeant major to make tea. In the pre-dawn hours of the next morning The Boy and his friends are thrown out of their beds, funk holes and off their feet by explosions up and down the British trench line. The Germans have tunneled up under their trenches and planted powerful mines. Battalions to the left and right are subjected to massive destruction and casualties, but The Boy’s is unmolested. Even as fighting rages along the length of the division’s front, his battalion waits for an assault that never comes. Art and empathy, for one day, have worked a miracle. Just as in the Christmas Truce of 1914, war soon reasserts itself. Artillery, mortars, gas attacks, night raids, the snap of sniper rounds and grazing machine gun fire would return. Before long The Boy, already sick with trench fever, catches a Blighty wound and is repatriated back to England, but not before finding out from a German prisoner that the battalion opposite them, without warning in the depth of winter, hand been marched off to the Russian Front. In preparation for creating illustrations I looked at works, fictional and historical, on WWI published since the 1970. In 2009 Book Palace Books published an anthology of 26 WWI articles written by Michael Butterworth (1924-1986) and illustrated by Frank Bellamy (1917-1976) in 1970 for the English weekly children’s magazine Look and Learn (Fig.72) in a limited edition book. From 1979 to 1985 writer Pat Mills (b.1949) and illustrator Joe Colquhoun (1924-1987) collaborated on a comic strip, Charley’s War. This gritty WWI coming of age story is still wildly popular and like the work of Bellamy and Butterworth, available in hardbound anthologies. Unlike the earlier Look and Learn pieces, Charley’s War takes the horror of WWI head on (Fig.73). Mills and Colquhoun’s strip, though drawn with a classic comic book style I chose not to go with, does provide inspiration for an archetype I was looking to capitalize on, the gruff mustachioed sergeant major (Fig.74)

Fig.72 Frank Bellamy, No Retreat, n d, mixed media, cover for Look Fig.73 Joe Colquhoun, pen and ink, from weekly comic strip Charley’s and Learn. War.

Fig.74 Joe Colquhoun, pen and ink, detail from weekly comic strip Charley’s War.

Two other books, graphic novels with a far more contemporary look, illustrate the realities of combat in the trenches of France in the spirit I was aiming for. Jacques Tardi’s 1994 It Was the War of the Trenches, while rendered in a highly stylized way, treats its subject with complete visual and narrative honesty. There is no romance or heroics, only boredom and filth occasionally interrupted by terror being suffered by both sides. While Charley’s War always shows the Germans as sneering brutes, Tardi makes them as much disenchanted victims of the trenches as the French poilu (Fig.75).

. Fig.75 Jacques Tardi, 1994, pen and ink, page 3 from graphic novel It Was the War of the Trenches.

A group of artists and writers created a graphic novel in 2010 that approaches what I hope to create with The Boy Who Drew Soldiers. Co-authors Patrick Cothias and Patrice Ordas join artists Alain Mounier and Sebastien Bouet in creating a well researched and beautifully rendered story about a young French doctor working for the first time at the front. It directly addresses, as does And the Soldiers Sang, the common humanity and empathy-opposing combatants had in WWI. Meeting in the middle of no man’s land, German and French soldiers help each other retrieve their dead and wounded (Fig.76). The images in L’Ambulance 13 also reinforced the analysis that green, especially acrid viridian, married with earth tones, was central to telling the story of WWI with color.

Fig.76 Alain Mounier and Sebastien Bouet, 2010, mixed media, page 42 from graphic novel L’Ambulance.

A final book, Nice Day for a War: Adventures of a Kiwi Soldier in World War, written by Matt Elliot (b.1969) and illustrated by Chris Slane (b.1957) touches on my desire to appeal to middle-school curriculums as part of a marketing plan. Published in 2011 by HarperCollins, the same publisher as Drawing Fire, it has classic comic book action content (Fig.77) balanced with solid educational material (Fig.78) It also does not hesitate to address mature issues, like death and the fear of death (Fig.79) and what a life of mind-numbing routine is really like for an average soldier at the front. And again, like so many other artists and illustrators who’ve taken the time to understand what WWI was like, they’ve used color to tell the story (Fig.80). While Batman-like WHAMS and BAMS make it possible to invoke the sounds of battle, Slane, in his illustrations uses a palette of disquieting greens contrasted with washes of yellow ochre and subtle muted violets to communicate emotions and sensory content which are not so easily portrayed visually.

Fig.77 Chris Slane, 2011, mixed media, page 29 of Nice Day for a War: Adventures of a Kiwi Soldier in World War I.

Fig.78 Chris Slane, 2011, mixed media, page 42 from A Nice Day for a War: Adventures of a Kiwi Soldier in World War I.

Fig.79 Chris Slane, 2011, mixed media, page 32 from Nice Day for a War: Adventures of Kiwi Soldier in World War I.

Fig.80 Chris Slane, 2011, mixed media, page 43 of Nice Day for a War: Adventures of a Kiwi Soldier in World War I.

There is one final bit of inspiration so obvious as to be almost invisible. This is a story about a boy and drawing, and the power of picture making. Childhood is far behind me, and while the memory of

46 why and what I drew is clear, the how is not. All I can say with any assurance is the passion, despite life’s ups and downs, to put pencil to paper never left. Like Piaget’s stages of cognitive growth, drawing follows its own path, and it turns out another Frenchman took the time to study it. I knew in the illustrations for The Boy Who Drew Soldiers I would be including childhood drawings by The Boy. The naturalist in me, as with many other aspects of this thesis, wanted to understand as deeply as possible the nature of children’s picture making. While the budding inner imagist would be making these drawings up, I still wanted them to be as authentic as possible. In 2010 Richard P. Jolley (b.1964), a psychology professor at Staffordshire University in Britain, published Children and Pictures: Drawing and Understanding. Jolley brought together in one book the research done over the past century on children creating pictures. Over the course of this program he’s been good enough to correspond with me and provide additional insights. In his overview of available research Jolley references much of present-day behavioral psychology on children’s drawing back to Georges-Henri Luquet (1876-1965). Although trained as a philosopher, he was deeply interested in cognitive psychology as it related to children’s drawing in particular and how people communicate with images in general. His pioneering work, Le dessin enfantin (Children's Drawings), published in 1927, was known to have deeply influenced Piaget, the source of the thesis’ central theme of empathy. Like Piaget, Loquat based his early work on a ten-year study of his own children. Loquat’s Theory of Drawing Development describes five stages leading to mature picture making. Our first stage he calls “trace making.” The child scribbles for the pure enjoyment of it. There is no attempt or awareness of trying to create anything representative. Next comes “fortuitous realism,” where either we, or perhaps a parent, make a post hoc interpretation that the scribbles look like something. The third stage of “failed realism” finds us consciously trying to create representational drawings, but our still inchoate cognitive and motor skills are not sufficiently developed. The fourth phase is the one where most of us get stuck, “intellectual realism.” Jolley, in his commentary on Luquet’s theory, notes that most of us don’t advance beyond this stage and stop drawing somewhere between the ages of ten and twelve. With intellectual realism we try to draw what we know about something and not what we actually see from one viewpoint. The final stage is “visual realism” and here Jolley says “children begin to notice that the relations between elements change as we move our viewpoint of the subject matter. . .and they begin to get to grips with the graphic techniques of visual realism that include occlusion, suppression of details, and perspective.” Jolley points out Luquet’s belief this final phase is a “stage of intention rather than achievement.” Much like the development of

47 empathy, we have to choose to pursue the final leg of artistic growth. Two more dots for my thesis are connected. I now had another means, both in the arch of the narrative and with artwork, to connect empathy and drawing. In keeping with the practices of Norman Rockwell (1894-1978), I’ve used neighborhood kids to pose for The Boy at different ages. During the photo shoots I’ve asked them to draw from several of the military action figures used for other reference work. In light of Jolley and Luquet, it was interesting to go back and look at the sketches two boys, ages five and seven, created and note that the younger, Colin Hedge (b.2005), is in the failed realism stage (Fig.81), while the older, Sam Driscoll (b.2003), is actually doing things indicative of the final phase of visual realism (Figs.82 and 83).

Fig.81 Colin Hedge, Soldier in a Pith Helmet, 2011, pencil on paper.

Fig.82 Sam Driscoll, Machine Gunner, 2012, pencil on paper. Fig.83 Sam Driscoll, Sentry on Patrol, 2012, pencil on paper.

Jolley was able to provide me with a valuable insight into the nuts and bolts of my own artistic development. Although my father, a no-nonsense WWII Marine combat veteran, had reservations about my dream of becoming an artist, he may have inadvertently planted the seed that insured that a passion for drawing and art would stick. My father used to do something with me he called “squiggling.” He would have me draw crazy free-form shapes, which he would then turn into something, and in turn he’d do the same for me. I asked Jolley if he had ever heard of squiggling and he responded:

“I suspect that the early drawing experience you had with your father is unusual. I think parents more typically draw subject matter for the child, often requested by the child who wants to know how to draw something (a cat, horse, etc.). Alternatively, a parent might show the child how to draw a particular feature of a topic that the child is struggling with. Often, however, many parents feel as equally challenged in their drawing ability as the child might do. Clearly your father was a different case entirely, and appears someone very comfortable with drawing. The technique used with you is indeed very interesting and certainly creative. A few benefits come to mind. First, it would have shown you how any given shape can be used for a number of topics. Second, the activity encourages the perception of shape and line for its own sake, a focus

that is common amongst artists whereas the majority of the population see pictures as representations of subject matter. Third, the activity encourages creativity beyond the artistic domain. It reminds me of a well-known divergent thinking test in which the participant (including children) is given various objects (e.g. a brick, newspaper, etc.) and asked to come up with ideas how each of these things could be used (beyond their functional intended use, e.g., a newspaper as a hat). So I would say this ‘squiggling’ activity as you called it was very beneficial to you, at least from an artistic perspective but possibly also as an encouragement to creative thinking generally. I would imagine something similar would be found in certain art classes in school, and also in homes with an artistic parent, but aside from that I think it would be uncommon.”

With this wonderful analysis Jolley placed the final missing piece in the jigsaw puzzle of The Boy Who Drew Soldiers. I had a way to invest my personal material into the character of The Boy from the very beginning of the story. The Boy and his father would “squiggle” in the short time they had together. But more than that, he’d given me closure and an answer, perhaps from the grave, to the question of artistic calling as blessing or curse. That is inspiring.

This chapter will cover fourteen illustrations for The Boy Who Drew Soldiers. Giving the novella a traditional look that would appeal to educators was my guiding principle. This chapter will first cover the materials, color palette and general process, followed by the artistic, conceptual and storyline inspirations unique to each illustration. I’m hard on material. Every canvas I’ve ever stretched, after being worked on for a couple hours has to be re-stretched. My brushes fare even worse. Knowing the content to be illustrated for this thesis would translate into physically intense brush strokes, I decided to stretch my canvases over hardboard. I cut half-inch hardboard into two sizes—16-inch by 20-inch, and 24-inch by 36-inch. These are standard off-the-shelf frame and would avoid expensive custom framing. It wouldn’t save brushes. Over the hardboard I stretched medium-weave canvas and applied three coats of tinted gesso. The tint for the gesso was based on Belgium linen. I took a swatch of linen to a local paint store, where they analyzed and made a base tint, which I mixed with white Liquitex gesso. Each coat of tinted gesso was sanded with 100 grit paper. This process gives a smooth neutral surface with enough “tooth” to allow painterly “scumbling” effects. The tint would also help unify the body of illustrations. For my brushes I used primarily number six and eight synthetic filberts. The filberts load with pigment well, give a nice expressive stroke, have a crisp enough leading edge to allow for most detail work, and hold up reasonably well to aggressive work. The filberts were augmented with one large flat for initial blocking-in, and a series of smaller rounds and angulars for tighter detailing in the final layers (Fig.84). The basic palette for The Boy Who Drew Soldiers illustrations, as discussed in the Inspiration chapter, is built around viridian-green and heavily weighted with earth colors (Fig.84). Central to the color analysis is the WWI war art of Orpen (Figs.85 and 86) and Canadian Alexander Young Jackson (1882-1974) (Fig.87) . I originally planned on executing the illustrations in water-based oils, but as a result of listening to presenters and creating images for residency period assignments, I returned to a medium I hadn’t touched in 40 years—acrylics. These illustrations were done in Liquitex Heavy Body acrylics.

Fig.84 Michael Fay, photograph of basic brushes and palette for The Boy Who Drew Soldiers, 2012.

Fig.85 William Orpen, The Somme: A Clear Day, 1917, oil on Fig.86 William Orpen, Zonnebeke, 1918, oil on canvas. canvas.

Fig.87 Alexander Young Jackson, Houses of Ypres, 1917, oil on canvas.

Each of the eight paintings followed a standard process—1. Researching period photographs and art, and additional reference created as necessary. 2. Drawings from reference done on tracing paper. 3. Sketches composited into final designs and transferred to painting surfaces. 4. Carbon transfers gone over with a mixture of raw umber and Payne’s grey. 5. Large areas blocked in, followed by a general working up of images and a final tightening of details and highlights. During the November 2010 residency period in New York City we had a class on shooting photographic reference material with illustrator Ted Lewin at his Brooklyn studio. As a result his guidance and lighting demonstration (Figs. 88 and 89), I returned home and purchased two sets of dual 500-watt freestanding halogen lamps. I used dime-store nylon umbrellas in white, yellow, red and blue clamped to the lamps to introduce color.

Fig.88 Michael Fay, Untitled, 2010, Fig.89 Michael Fay, Untitled, 2010, digital photograph. digital photograph.

The first painting in this series shows The Boy soon after being “orphaned” and coming to live at his grandfather’s rural cottage. This was an extremely difficult time and I wanted to show him in a

53 loving environment. The illustration shows him listening to his grandfather and best friend, Mr. Sykes (a play on the word psyche) as they go through the few belongings of The Boy’s father returned from the Boer War. The men, as they sort through the father’s diary and sketch books, are reminiscing about their time fighting in the Zulu Wars and what it’s like to lose a friend in combat. The Boy is fascinated by their stories and his father’s Artists Rifles cap badge—something that will prove to be both a real and symbolic connection to his lost parent. The theme of this illustration is from FLASH, the empathetic language discussed previously in the Inspiration chapter. Here I illustrated the “L”—love. In telling this story with chroma, I wanted The Boy to enter the novella pictorially with warm embracing colors—from a place of love. As the story progresses, the images will become cooler and increasingly disquieting through a calculated addition of the palette’s pivotal color, viridian. There are three types of Greek drama—tragedy, irony and comedy. In a tragedy things start out bad, turn good, but end bad, the arch of an irony goes from bad to good and ends up good, or goes from good to better, and ends up bad. Classic Greek comedy has nothing to do with humor. A comedy starts good, turns bad and ultimately ends well. The Boy Who Drew Soldiers is a comedy. The Boy, though touched by tragedy, is not a tragic figure, and rendering him with a palette always warmer than local color will follow him through the novella’s illustrations.

Fig.90 Michael Fay, reference photograph, 2011. Fig.91 Michael Fay, reference photograph, 2011. My home in old town Fredericksburg, Virginia is a circa 1740s colonial dependency. Semi- attached to a mansion, it would have been the kitchen and home for household servants. It has a fireplace with a large opening and rough-hewn mantel (Fig.90). Two friends and one of their sons,

54 posed for me. I asked them to dress in baggy shirts and to wear suspenders. I purchased two Churchwarden pipes and tobacco, and both men agreed to smoke them. Most working men in England at the turn of the century sported a scarf, so I provided them with strips of dark khaki fabric to knot about their necks. Above the mantel I hung my 1875 Martini-Henry rifle—the type the grandfather would have carried in the Zulu Wars. The scene in front of the fireplace was lit through red umbrellas clamped to the halogen lamp crossbars.

Fig.92 Michael Fay, reference photograph, 2010. Fig.93 Michael Fay, reference photograph, 2010

In the final piece I composited The Boy looking at his father’s d Artists Rifles cap badge (Fig.91), a typical English coal-burning cottage stove (Fig.92), a beamed ceiling, and the grandfather lighting a pipe (Fig.93). After sharing the first work in progress (Fig.94) with Thomson, my faculty advisor, he gave a quick tutorial on being an imagist. As an imagist I would have to exercise more conscious control over viewers than my native naturalist impulse ever would. It wasn’t enough to just costume, pose and light acquaintances. The real work doesn’t end with creating reference material, but in taking the photographs to the next level—making them illustrations. Thomson asked me to think of the majority of elements in the image as background sound. The illustrator’s task is to artfully draw attention to the primary thing. Doing this required only three simple tools—value, chroma and line. Our eyes naturally go to pictorial content of the highest value, the warmest color and with the strongest graphic line work. That would be my mantra for this and every work to follow.

Fig.94 Michael Fay, unfinished version of illustration Father’s Things Come Home , 2010, water-based oil on canvas.

One of the “hero’s journey” themes running through the entirety of The Boy Who Drew Soldiers is “atonement with the father.” This is addressed early in the narrative when The Boy pulls his grandfather’s rifle off the mantel, puts on his father’s pith helmet and goes out into the garden to play soldier. Empathy is an existential attempt to get inside someone else’s skin and that’s what this next image is about. With this illustration, Playing Soldier, I start introducing darker content. The Boy, using a set of steps leading to a darkened basement door, pretends to be on guard duty with his grandfather’s bayoneted rifle (Fig.95). Inspired by a WWI German recruiting poster by Fritz Erler (1888-1940) (Fig.96), he gazes out from under the brim of an oversized pith helmet with eyes lost in shadow and the lower part of his face catching warm reflected light from the top step. Erler’s poster has the disquieting palette characteristic of WWI art, and the effect is heightened by a disconcerting off-balance tilt of the picture plane. In this illustration I incorporate the same slight isometric perspective (Fig.97) and introspective lighting of the face (Fig.98) in Helft uns Siegen! (Help us Win!). The Boy’s first protagonist is his grandfather’s housekeeper, Mrs. Jaundier (a play on the phrase for exhibiting envy and hostility; “a jaundiced view”). Here we have two more of the FLASH content

56 illustrated—fear and anger. With this image I wanted to communicate the degree to which The Boy draws soldiers and the anger triggered in the housekeeper.

Fig.95 Michael Fay, reference photograph, Fig.96 Fritz Erler, Helft uns Siegen!, 1917, mixed media.

Fig.97 Michael Fay, Playing Soldier, 2011, acrylic on Fig.98 Michael Fay, How Does It Feel to Be a Soldier?, canvas, first stage of illustration . 2011, arylic on canvas, second stage of illustation.

The Boy’s first protagonist is his grandfather’s housekeeper, Mrs. Jaundier (a play on the phrase for exhibiting envy and hostility; “a jaundiced view”). Here we have two more of the FLASH content illustrated—fear and anger. With this image I wanted to communicate the degree to which The Boy draws soldiers and the anger triggered in the housekeeper.

Fig.99 Michael Fay, reference photograph, 2011. Fig.100 Michael Fay, reference photgraph, 2011.

While working up sketches for this third piece I realized the reference material (Fig.99), which was focused heavily on character and gesture above the tabletop, was lacking. More information about The Boy’s lower torso was needed, and in a second photo shoot attention was focused on leg and foot placement, and a better view of the chair with respect to the table (Fig.100). I was learning to consciously orchestrate even the most mundane elements to serve the overall design. Once the sketch was finished, placed on the canvas (Fig.101) and color being laid in (Fig.102) , I decided to float the scene against a backdrop of drawings done by The Boy. With this “imagist” design choice I finally started to allow ideas to take precedence over pictorial literalness. I wanted to show how overwhelming at times the amount of drawings could be and give the viewer an idea where some of the housekeeper’s angst was coming from.

Fig.101 Michael Fay, first stage of A Good Scolding, 2011, Fig.102 Michael Fay, second stage of A Good Scolding,2011 acrylic on canvas. acrylic on canvas.

The fourth and fifth plot-centric pieces take us forward to The Boy at war. With these illustrations the palette is fully invested with earth tones and viridian. During WWI British and German forces inflicted a never-ending stream of horrors on each other—the worst of which was poison gas. Conducting gas attacks depended on knowing which way the wind was going to blow, and predicting the weather was an imperfect science at best. More often than not, both sides suffered equally when gas was used. Their shared suffering after a gas attack introduces empathy into the storyline for the first time. Captured Germans would often assist with British wounded, and the Tommies would always allow them to keep their gas masks. The H, “hurt” in FLASH is also a subtext. Working on Guarding Germans After the Gas Attack I kept the reference material close at hand (Fig. 103). I combined imagery from period black-and-white photos with posed reference photographs using fellow artist Kristopher Battles (b.1968) and one-sixth action figures (Fig.104). The inspiration for Battles’ pose (Fig.105) is Charles Sargeant Jagger’s (1885-1934) Wipers (Fig.106). Jagger served in the Artists Rifles in WWI and was decorated for heroism. “Wipers” was British slang for the heavily contested area around Ypres, France.

Fig.103 Michael Fay, reference photograph, 2012. Fig.104 Michael Fay, second stage of After the Gas Attack, 2011 acrylic on canvas.

Fig.105 Michael Fay, reference photograph, Fig.106 Charles Sargeant Jagger, Wipers, 2012. 1919-1920, bronze. The final smaller format narrative piece is the most ambitious. For it I built and lit a set for staging a one-sixth figure (Fig.107) and took reference photos using Battles (Fig.108) that I would integrate into the final layout. Few things in WWI could match the discomfort and panic of being lost at night in the labyrinth of front-line, reserve and communication trenches. Knee deep in foul and frigid water (Fig.109), soldiers would wander lost for hours, if not days. Over time they faced not only the psychological wounds, but the terrible possibility of trench foot.

Fig.107 Michael Fay, reference photograph, 2012. Fig.108 Michael Fay, reference photograph, 2011.

Fig.109 Unknown photographer, Colonel Philip Fig.110 Unknown Photographer, Trenches at Hill ‘62 Robertson, 1st Battalion, Cameronians (Scottish Sanctuary Wood Museum, 2008. Rifles) in waterlogged trenches at Bois Grenier, 1916.

Abandoning frontline guard posts, for any reason, was a capital offense in the British army, and occasionally soldiers weary beyond caring would sleepwalk across no man’s land, or wake up kilometers away in friendly, but unfamiliar territory. In many parts of the Western Front the German and Allied

61 trench lines lay mere yards from each other, and even be co-located, separated only by bundles of barbed wire. Decomposing bodies, unexploded ordinance, swarms of rats and the very real likelihood of running into an enemy raiding party lay around every bend (Fig.110). Even worse, for those poor souls who’ve slept-walked away from post, a summary court-martial and a firing squad might await— this is the situation The Boy is facing in this illustration. In figures 111, 112 and 113 you can see how the illustration progresses from line to broad washes with a mixture of raw umber, viridian and Payne’s grey, and then to the initial notes of color. The next three illustrations were done on the three 24-inch by 36-inch canvases. These larger works would follow a collage format and operate visually on several layers. Mindful of my marketing plan, I wanted to create images that would have appeal as educational tools—ones that teachers could focus general discussions on. These are illustrations where major themes are brought together.

Fig.111 Michael Fay, first stage of Fig.112 Michael Fay, second stage of Fig.113 Michael Fay, second stage of Lost in the Trenches, 2012, acrylic Lost in the Trenches, 2012, acrylic Lost in the Trenches, 2012, acrylic on canvas. on canvas. on canvas.

During my tenure as the official artist for the Marine Corps, in addition to embedding with combat units, I helped design displays for National Museum of the Marine Corps. Opening in November 2006, the NMMC has a major educational outreach program. I wanted some of my illustrations to have a museum-like feel. This was reinforced by the Slane’s illustrations for Nice Day for a War: Adventures of a Kiwi Soldier in World War I, where original artwork is combined with period artifacts and photographs (Fig.114).

Fig.114 Chris Slane, 2011, mixed media, illustration from Nice Day for a War: Adventures of a Kiwi Soldier in World War I.

The first piece, Out in No Man’s Land, combines the impersonal horror of no man’s land with personal material. The scene shows a group of three skulls, a dead Tommy, a fallen German soldier, and a observation balloon going down in flames, and takes advantage of the empathetic potential of “before and after” imagery. Period photographic resources were reproduced and painted in a “trompe l'oeil” manner. I wanted these collaged-in images to have a concreteness rather than a “cut-and-paste” look. I wanted the illustrations to have an educational feel without the dryness of a textbook spread. Out in No Man’s Land has many of the signature things you would see across the devastated expanse between enemy lines on the Western Front—disabled tanks, destroyed concrete pill boxes, shattered trees, bricks and the shells of houses, human remains, rusted sheets of corrugated metal, duckboards and shell-holes filled with water fouled by gas, explosives and decomposing bodies. I assembled cutouts from WWI photographs on a sheet of 24-inch by 36-inch paper with a high horizon line (Fig.115). While the background and middle ground were satisfied in this collage, it was evident I needed to come up with a solid foreground. For this I relied on a painting by Nevinson, After a Push (Fig.116). Before the war Nevinson was a central figure in the British Vorticist movement, and his pre- and early-war paintings (Fig.117) were representative of this Futurist-like style. The war would change his art permanently and post-war he would go from the darling of London art critics to a pariah. Nevinson’s After a Push had the foreground inspiration I was looking for, and reinforced my choice of the disquieting palette other painters had employed to capture a landscape profoundly violated by the instruments and chemistry of war.

Fig.115 Michael Fay, preparatory collage and drawing for No Man’s Land, 2011.

Fig.116 Christopher R.W. Nevinson, After a Push, 1917, Fig.117 Christopher R. W. Nevinson, Returning to the Trenches, oil on canvas. 1914-1915, oil on canvas.

Fig.118 Michael Fay, first stage of No Man’s Land, 2011, acrylic on canvas.

The high horizon with a low foreboding sky seen in the first stage of No Man’s Land (Fig.118) was inspired by a charcoal sketch of Bone’s (Fig.119). Nash’s The Menin Road (Fig.120), considered WWI’s quintessential vision of no man’s land, made me particularly aware of the “elephant iron” sheets that lay rusting everywhere at the front.

Fig.119 Muirhead Bone, The Untilled Fields, 1918, charcoal on paper.

Fig.120 Paul Nash, The Menin Road, 1919, oil on canvas.

I had WWI photographic references for a dead German (Fig.121), but not one that satisfied my vision for a corresponding British Tommy. This would be my first photo shoot using one-sixth scale military action figures (Fig.122). I knew I wanted the deceased Tommy to be face down in a crater—it 65 would give him a level of anonymity equal to the German’s. I was interested only in the pose and the effect of body parts under the water’s surface. The finished illustration would be set at twilight, when light would be very diffused, so the figure was photographed under a sheet outdoors in a shallow crater lined with plastic and filled with water.

Fig.121 Unknown photographer, Body of a German Infantryman, Western Front.

Fig.122 Michael Fay, reference photograph, 2011.

When I started to add color to the canvas I used the painting For What? (Fig.123) by Canadian war artist Frederick Varley (1881-1969) for color reference. Varley was a leading figure in the pre-war Canadian art movement called The Group of Seven. This painting gave me a stark example of the mangled earth and jaundiced water that I would use in the final version of No Man’s Land (Fig.124).

Fig.123 Frederick Varley, For What?, 1917, oil on canvas.

Fig.124 Michael Fay, third stage mock up with photos of No Man’s Land, 2012, acrylic on canvas.

The next large piece depicts the aftermath of The Boy’s first attack on the German front-line. Prior to the assault he’d been sent into no man’s land to sketch their positions. The battle was a success for the Tommies but The Boy is full of remorse—he has killed in combat for the first time. To compound his angst, he realizes that his painstaking reconnaissance drawings aided the British artillery in devastating what had once been bucolic French countryside.

This illustration, First Attack (Fig.125) shows a section of German trench line immediately after an initial wave of British troops has swept over them. In 1917 the Germans did a 40-kilometer tactical retreat to a more defensible position called the Hindenburg Line. The Boy and his battalion have to attack across ground previously untouched by war.

Fig.125 Michael Fay, third stage mock-up of First Attack, 2012, acrylic and objects on canvas.

The dead Tommies lying along the lane blasted in the barbed wire come from posed (Fig.126) and period photographs (Fig.127).

Fig.126 Michael Fay, reference photograph, 2011. Fig.127 Unknown photographer, New Zealand Dead, 1916.

I found it useful to refer to Varley again to see how a period war artist used photo reference to create imagery after the fact. He used a photograph of dead German artillerymen (Fig.128) in his post- war painting The Sunken Road (Fig.129). Like my illustration, Varley’s dead are laid out amid blasted chalk beneath a blue sky.

Fig.128 Unknown photographer, Dead German Artillerymen, 1918. Fig.129 Frederick Varley, The Sunken Road, 1919, oil on canvas. For the three sketches incorporated in this illustration, a British re-enactor at the GWA site in Newville, PA., posed for a series photographs of a Tommy tossing a hand grenade into a German bunker (Fig.130). The drawings, done by The Boy, show him trying to process his first experience killing others in combat.

Fig.130 Michael Fay, series of reference photographs, 2011.

From the paintings of Orpen I knew that the effect of fresh emplacements and artillery fire would be ribbons and crater rims of exposed chalk. In doing research also knew that there would be German “air-burst” artillery fire being called in to slow the Tommies as they advanced on second and third defensive lines. Although it represents no particular place, in the distance I placed a low ridge- line— many WWI battles with casualties in the tens-of-thousands were fought over what otherwise would be considered unremarkable pieces of landscape. This illustration marks a pivotal loss-of-innocence moment. The horizon line is tilted dramatically down to the left and the viewer is directed to the break in the German trenches through which The Boy and his battalion penetrated the enemy’s position. As in No Man’s Land, the once verdant countryside is reduced to a plain of toothpick-like trees. For The Boy his last romantic illusions about the glory of war have died along with his buddies, whose bodies line the final yards up to the blasted opening in the previously well-ordered sandbagged position. To hammer this point home, I included in the illustration an original cigarette card showing an idealized image of an Artists Rifles soldier, and an actual WWI shoulder title and cap badge from this storied territorial regiment (Fig.131).

Fig.131 Michael Fay, reference photograph of Artists Rifles Players cigarette card and brass shoulder title, 2012.

The third large format illustration shows the moment The Boy Who Drew Soldiers’ arch of the narrative is leading to—the confrontation in no man’s land between The Boy and a German scout. This piece comes entirely from staged photographic reference. A set was created in my garden using flour as snow (Fig.132) and highway flares for dramatic lighting (Fig.133).

Fig.132 Michael Fay, reference photograph, 2011.

Fig.133 Michael Fay, reference photograph, 2011.

This piece shows the moment The Boy and the German scout come face to face with weapons pointed at each other. With the flares I wanted to get the effect of explosions going off all around them, even as they stare each other down. In the final design I decided to take full advantage of the drama

71 created by the arms of earth radiating out from the crater they find themselves in (Fig.134). I took the most muscular of the arms down into the right hand corner and allowed the more tendril-like streaks of dirt to go off to the upper left. I wanted the scene to be raw and violent and the brushwork is aggressive (Fig.135).

Fig.134 Michael Fay, transfer drawing for Face-off in the Crater, 2011, pencil on tracing paper.

Fig.135 Michael Fay, Face-off in the Crater in progress, 2012, acrylic on canvas.

To reinforce the theme of empathy, I integrated in the final piece recruiting posters and a formal portrait of The Boy and the German. These soldiers are good men and they joined their respective armies for reasons. Ultimately it is the fact that they are good soldiers and share a common love of country and comrades that joins, rather than divides them. They were brought to this crater in the middle of no man’s land by virtually the same forces and circumstances. The final visuals for this thesis are a series of images for “first-letter” illuminations. These illuminations are intended to give the beginning of each chapter of The Boy Who Drew Soldiers a classic look. In the course of my research I discovered and purchased the three-volume set of La Guerre Racontée par Nos Généraux (Fig.136). Each chapter of this French history of WWI begins with a wonderful drop-cap illumination (Fig.137). In keeping with the spirit of these woodcuts, I selected things emblematic of WWI—hand grenades, tanks, gas masks, observation balloons and soldiers. These illustrations would be my sole nod to digital means.

Fig.136 Artist Unknown, Cover of La Guerre Racontée par Nos Fig.137 Antoine Marie Raynolt, woodcut, drop-cap Généraux, illuminated letter A used in three volume set of La Guerre Raconté par Nos Généraux.

Fig.138 Michael Fay, Father’s Things Come Home, 2012, acrylic on canvas.

Fig.139 Michael Fay, How Does It Feel to Be a Soldier?, 2012, acrylic on canvas.

Fig.140 Michael Fay, A Good Scolding, 2012, acrylic on canvas.

Fig.141 Michael Fay, Lost in the Trenches, 2012, acrylic on canvas

Fig.142 Michael Fay, After the Gas Attack, 2012, acrylic on canvas

Fig.143 Michael Fay, No Man’s Land, 2012, acrylic on canvas.

Fig.144 Michael Fay, First Attack, acrylic on canvas.

Fig.145 Michael Fay, Face-off in the Crater, 2012, acrylic on canvas.

Fig.146 Michael Fay, Untitled, 2011, mixed media on watercolor paper.

Fig.147 Michael Fay, Untitled, 2011, mixed media on watercolor paper.

Fig.148 Michael Fay, Untitled, 2011, mixed media on watercolor paper

Fig.149 Michael Fay, Untitled, 2011, mixed media on watercolor paper.

Fig.150 Michael Fay, Untitled, 2011, mixed media on watercolor paper.

Fig.151 Michael Fay, Untitled, 2012, mixed media on watercolor paper.

There are natural intersections of war and culture. In 2014 the world will mark the 100th anniversary of the beginning of WWI—the war to end all wars. In that same year many of the nations that fought together, even on opposing sides in the trenches of France, will be departing the longest war since the dark days of early August 1914—Afghanistan. Since the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, I’ve found myself at the nexus of art and conflict as one of a mere handful of working war artists. My first two deployments as the official combat artist for the United States Marine Corps, 2002 and 2003 to Iraq and Afghanistan, drew the attention of the Associated Press, the Washington Post, CNN and C-Span. In 2005 I was offered a one-man show at the Farnsworth Museum and Wyeth Center in Rockland, Maine. For my 2005-2006 deployment to Iraq I had set up a blog for family and friends called Fire and Ice (www.mdfay1.blogspot.com). At that time I knew little to nothing about the Internet and the reach of Google searches. In short order, I found myself contacted by, and subsequently featured across multiple media and academic venues. The BBC did a documentary about me, I was ABC’s Person of the Week, the subject of a New York Times’ Arts and Leisure Sunday section article, a piece in American Artist Drawing Quarterly, and participant in two symposiums sponsored by the New York School of Visual Arts. The writing I had been doing at my Fire and Ice blog attracted the attention of several editors and invitations to pen illustrated freelance pieces for the New York Times’ Opinionator and Frontlines Internet magazines and the Canadian newspaper The National Post followed. The James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, hosted a second one-man show in 2007 and in 2010 I was a guest speaker at the Norman Rockwell Museum. I am still approached on a weekly basis about my work and experiences as a war artist by everything from art history graduate students to CBS News. British publisher Thames and Hudson asked me to contribute to a college art textbook— Gateways to Art. One of my paintings, with personal reflections about being a war artist, sits across the page from a WWI one by Otto Dix (Fig.152). Without trying, my brand as a resident expert about war and culture has been set.

Fig.152 Michael Fay, pages 538 and 539 from Chapter 4.7, Art and War, from Gateways to Art, published in 2012 by Thames and Hudson.

After our March 2011 residency period I stayed on in San Francisco and pitched the idea for the illustrated novella, The Boy Who Drew Soldiers, to my agency representative, Katherine Boyle (b.1969). She agreed wholeheartedly that the approaching anniversary of WWI would create a demand for fresh books, and tailoring one to address a broad spectrum of educational goals would further enhance the novella’s market appeal. We’re aiming for a July 2013 rollout of the proposal. Boyle has several New York Times and Times of London best sellers to her credit, and is currently negotiating the final details of my memoir with McFarland Books, and a comprehensive art survey book of current working war artists with Thames and Hudson. Like Private Len Smith, through the tireless efforts of his nephew, much of the buzz and attention about my work as a war artist has been due to the Internet and contacts driven by Google searches. My marketing plan is three-fold—assist my agent in producing a formal proposal for The Boy Who Drew Soldiers, expand my Internet presence and continue being active in the academic community. I have already produced for Boyle two book proposals using a standard format—Overview, Author Biography, Market and Publicity, Endorsements and Art Reviews, Competition and Chapter Summaries. I maintain three blogs, Fire and Ice (www.mdfay1.blogspot.com), The Joe Bonham Project (www.joebonhamproject.blogspot.com) and The International Society of War Artists (www.internationalsocietyofwarartists.blogspot.com), a Facebook page called Still in the Fight

(http://www.facebook.com/stillinthefight), and have reserved the domain name www.thewarartist.com, for the three book projects. I’m also teaching and lecturing at VCU’s art school, and am key organizer and participant in Arts, Military and Healing (Fig.153). AMH is a consortium of academic institutions and professionals from George Mason University, The University of North Carolina, The Smithsonian Institution, The Corcoran and The Library of Congress who are conducting week-long seminars across the country ((http://www.artsandmilitary.org/pages/index.php).

Fig.153 Flyer for Arts, Military and Healing at http://www.artsandmilitary.org/pages/index.php

Another key sub-component of the marketing plan for The Boy Who Drew Soldiers lies in the creation of supporting educational material. In 2007 I was introduced to and became fast friends with Conway Bown (b.1966), official war artist for the Australia Defense Forces. Conway introduced me to wonderful educational resource he helped produced called The Art of War in Iraq: A Case Study of Australian War Artist Captain Conway Bown and the Australian Experience in Iraq. Although the title is a mouthful, the result is an interesting educational tool aimed at helping Australian school students to culturally process the meaning of their nation’s involvement in a war through art (Fig.154).

Fig.154 The Art of War in Iraq: A Case Study of Australian War Artist Captain Conway Bown and the Australian Experience in Iraq, Australian Defense Force and Ryebuck Media, 2008.

The Australian Defense Force’s educational material provides a great template for systematic activities that guide students through discussions focused on observing, responding, interpreting and reaching conclusions about the experiences of soldiers at war. Clearly, like the content of The Boy Who Drew Soldiers, the goal is a deepened sense of empathy. Working off of the final page from Chris Slane’s Nice Day for a War: Adventures of a Kiwi Soldier in World War I (Fig.155), my educational material will also address art education curriculum content.

Fig.155 Chris Slane, page 96 from Nice Day For a War: Adventures of a Kiwi Soldier in World War I.

Across four decades of artistic life, in addition to resisting the label of illustrator, I had successfully avoided working from my imagination. During this same period, my interaction with other working artists was limited. This program rectified these situations. I came with a set of limitations that were eroded with each residency period’s classes, guest presenters and museum visits. My reportage mindset, the inclination to leave much to the viewer, has been tempered by a growing appreciation and practice of imagist illustration. I’ve learned to start wearing more hats than just that of observer and recorder. I first heard the term “imagist” during a presentation by Dennis Ziemienski (b.1947) during our March 2011 residency in San Francisco. As Ziemienski explained to me in a brief exchange following his presentation, an imagist is an “image maker.” This word helped me to conceptualize where I was trying to go with this MFA thesis. Coming into this program I was a naturalist, and “image finder” out in the external world, now I would have to expand into the inner world of imagination—small wonder that the content of this thesis would become profoundly personal. This program broadened my professional connections. At the November 2011 residency in New York City I met Victor Juhasz (b.1954), and as a result we’ve collaborated on The Joe Bonham Project (Fig.156), an outreach of the Society of Illustrators where artists spend time getting to know and sketch combat-wounded service members in military hospitals (Fig.157). Over the past year we’ve participated in four group shows and have been featured by the National Review, The New York Times, CBS News, Gentlemen’s Quarterly, and the National Endowment for the Arts magazine. Currently I’m curating for the Society of Illustrators an expanded The Joe Bonham Project exhibition for the entire month of November 2012 at the Pepco Edison Place Gallery in Washington, D.C.—located directly across the street from the National Portrait Gallery. Our artwork is destined for a collection of record with the Smithsonian National Museum of American History’s military and diplomatic collection, which also houses Bill Mauldin’s (1920-2000) WWII Willie and Joe cartoons and the body of official WWI war art created by eight American illustrators commissioned by the U.S. Army. I have also been invited to

92 participate in the official U.S. Air Force combat art program and will be featured both in an article and cover art in National Endowment for the Arts 2nd quarter 2012 magazine.

Fig.156 Jeffrey Fisher (b.1955), Corporal Stephen Fig.157 Victor Juhasz, Specialist Derek McConnell with Dog, 2012, Ferrell, poster for The Joe Bonham Project exhibition mixed media on watercolor paper. at the Storefront Gallery.

Like the majority of fellow graduate students, I found that a key motivation for pursuing a MFA is to be competitive in the collegiate teaching market. Even before graduating, due in large part to the reputation of this program, I was offered an adjunct assistant professor position with America’s number one rated public university art school at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. VCU’s Painting and Printmaking Department invited me to develop a four credit 400-level reportage drawing course, which I taught during the spring 2012 semester. The rigorous demand of writing reaction papers proved invaluable in conceiving how to approach this thesis paper. The sheer variety and quality of presenters to this program insured I would have to go the extra mile in thinking about current and past issues in American illustration and combine that with the influences and amazing output of each artist we’ve been introduced to. The quick feedback on these papers gave me much needed confidence in my writing and critical thinking abilities, and encouraged taking on complicated material that demanded multiple layers of integration.

This thesis’ project, the novella The Boy Who Drew Soldiers, is a work in progress. Over the next year I have to take a narrative from outline to completion. There are more than a dozen additional illustrations with photographic reference already shot and researched that need to be worked up. Within the limits of this thesis I didn’t get into the topic of camouflage, which figures prominently in the storyline. As I go forward with The Boy Who Drew Soldiers I hope to stay mindful of the project’s mission— to create a timely illustrated coming-of-age novella with age-appropriate and historically valid content. To do this I’ll need to rely on my native love of detail and reality, and continue to push the envelope of imagination with all the skills gained in this program.

Education  Bachelor of Science in Art Education, The Pennsylvania State University, 1982.  Master of Fine Arts in Illustration, The University of Hartford, expected 2012.

Teaching  Virginia Commonwealth University, Painting and Printmaking, adjunct assistant professor. Originated and teach Reportage Drawing (PAPR 491), a 4 credit course for juniors and seniors.

Professional Career  Official combat artist, 2000-2010, National Museum of the Marine Corps.

Personal Military Decorations  Meritorious Service Medal-2 awards  Combat Action Ribbon-2 awards  Navy Commendation Medal  Navy Achievement Medal-2 awards  Presidential Service Badge

Exhibitions  Farnsworth Museum and Wyeth Center, Rockland, Maine: One-man show, January to April 2005.  The Navy Museum, Washington, DC: One man show, June to October 2005.  James A. Michener Art Museum, Doylestown, Pennsylvania: One-man show, July to October 2007.  The Navy Museum, Washington, DC: Group show, September to November 2008.  The Peninsula Fine Arts Center, Newport News, Virginia: Group show, September to November 2009.

 The Workhouse Arts Center, Lorton, Virginia: Group show, July 2011.  PEPCO Edison Place Gallery, Washington, DC: Group show, August to September 2011.  The Storefront Gallery, Brooklyn, New York: Group show, September 2011 (curator).  PEPCO Edison Place Gallery, Washington, DC: Group show, November 2012 (curator).

Academic Symposiums  The University of Mary Washington, 2004.  The Pennsylvania State University, 2005.  New York School of Visual Arts, 2007 and 2009.  Norwich University, 2011.  George Mason University, 2011.  The Smith Farm Center for Healing and the Arts, 2011.  Arts, Military and Healing (a consortium of George Mason University, The Library of Congress, The Smithsonian, and The Corcoran Gallery and College of Art and Design), 2012.

Freelance Work  New York Times Frontlines, 7 illustrated pieces in 2006.  New York Times Opinionator, 6 illustrated from 2010 to 2011.  The National Post of Canada, 6 illustrated pieces in 2010.  The Leatherneck Magazine, 7 illustrated articles from 2002-2011.

 Baldridge, C. LeRoy. I Was There: With the Yanks on the Western Front 1917-1919. New York,

NY: The Knickerbocker Press, 1919.

 Barooshian, Vahan D. Vereshchangin: Artist at War. Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press,

1993.

 Bull, Stephen. Trench: A History of Trench Warfare on the Western Front. Oxford, England:

Osprey Publishing, 2010.

 Burrage, Alfred M. War Is War by Ex-Private X. Barnsley, England: Pen & Sword Books, Ltd,

2010.

 Butterworth, Michael. Frank Bellamy’s the Story of World War 1. London, England: Book Palace

Books, 2009

 Carter, Albert Charles Robinson. The Work of War Artists in South Africa. London, England: H.

Virtue & Co. Ltd, 1900.

 Compton, Ann. The Sculpture of Charles Sargeant Jagger. Hertfordshire, England: The Henry

Moore Foundation, 2004.

 Cothias, Patrick and Ordas, Patrice. L’Ambulance 13. Charnay-Les-Macon, France: PPO Graphic,

2010.

 Cutler, Laurence S. and Cutler, Judy Goffman. Maxfield Parrish and the American Imagists.

Edison, NJ: The Wellfleet Press, 2004.

 DeWitte, Debra J., Larmann, Ralph M. and Shields, M. Kathryn. Gateways to Art. New York, NY:

Thames and Hudson, 2012

 Drew, Joanna and Vaizey, Marina. Painter as Photographer. London, England: Lund, Humphries,

Bradford and London, 1982.

 Fayolle, Marie-Emile. La Guerre Racontee Par Nos Generaux, Volumes I, II and III. Paris, France:

Librairie Schwarz, 1920.

 Glover, Michael. The Fateful Battle Line: The Great War Journals and Sketches of Captain Henry

Ogle, MC. London, England: Leo Cooper, 1993.

 Gosling, Lucinda. Brushes & Bayonets: Cartoons, Sketches and Paintings of World War I. Oxford,

Great Britain: Osprey Publishing, 2008.

 Gough, Paul. A Terrible Beauty: British Artists in the First World War. Bristol, England: Sansom

& Company, 2010.

 Gregory, Barry. A History of the Artists Rifles: 1859-1947. South Yorkshire, England: Pen &

Sword Books Limited, 2006.

 Halstead, Jack. Jack’s War: The Diary and Drawings of Jack Halstead-A Great War Survivor.

Baldock, England: Streets Publishers, 2005.

 Harries, Meirion and Harries, Susie. The War Artists. London, England: Michael Joseph Ltd,

1983.

 Haycock, David Boyd. A Crisis of Brilliance: Five Young British Artists and the Great War.

London, England: Old Street Publishing Ltd, 2009.

 Jagger, Charles Sargeant. Modeling and Sculpture in the Making. London, England: The Studio

Publications, Inc., 1935.

 Jolley, Richard P. Children & Pictures: Drawing and Understanding. Chichester, United Kingdom:

John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2010.

 Johnson, David. The Boy Who Drew Cats. South Norwalk, Conn.: Abdo Publishing Company,

1995.

 Keegan, John and Darracott, Joseph. The Nature of War. New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart and

Winston, 1981.

 Krass, Peter. Portrait of War: The U.S. Army’s First Combat Artists and the Doughboys’

Experience in WWI. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2007.

 Laffin, John. The Western Front Illustrated: 1914-1918. Wolfeboro, NH: Alan Sutton Publishing,

1991.

 Lander, Hugh and Rauter, Peter. English Cottage Interiors. London, England: Cassell & Co.,

2001.

 MacDonald, Lyn. 1915: The Death of Innocence. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University

Press, 1993.

 Maze, Paul. A Frenchman in Khaki. Eastbourne, England: Antony Rowe, Ltd, 1934.

 Nash, Paul. Outline: An Autobiography. London, England: Columbus Books, 1949.

 Paret, Peter. Imaginary Battles: Reflections of War in European Art. Chapel Hill, NC: The

University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

 Pressfield, Steven. The Art of War: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative

Battles. New York, NY: Grand Central Publishing, 2002.

 Pyle, Howard. Otto of the Silver Hand. New York, NY: Random House, 1888.

 Schick, Ron. Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera. New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company,

2009.

 Slane, Chris and Elliott, Matt. A Nice Day For a War: Adventures of a Kiwi Soldier in World War I.

Auckland, New Zealand: Harper Collins Publishers, 2011.

 Smith, Len. Drawing Fire: The Diary of a Great War Soldier and Artist. London, England: Harper

Collins Publishers, 2009.

 Tardi, Jacques. It Was the War of the Trenches. Seattle, Wash.: Fantagraphics Books, 2010.

 Townsend, Harry Everett. War Diary of a Combat Artist. Niwot, CO: University of Colorado

Press, 1991.

 Upstone, Robert and Weight, Angela. William Orpen, an Onlooker in France: A Critical Edition of

the Artist’s War Memoirs. London, England: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2008.

 Walsh, Michael J. K. C.R.W. Nevinson: This Cult of Violence. New Haven, Conn: Yale University

Press, 2002.

 Weisberg, Gabriel P. Beyond Impressionism: The Naturalist Impulse. New York, NY: Harry N.

Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 1992.

 Weisberg, Gabriel P. The European Realist Tradition. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,

1982.

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