I draw beautiful soldiers.
My boys in uniform always smile; I give their skin that sun-warmed gold and their eyes that clear, fearless look. Like on old posters, where war is an adventure and duty is a shining road to glory.
And I feel like a hypocrite.
I’ve read the memoirs, watched the documentaries, seen thousands of meters of footage. I know war is stench, PTSD, broken souls, and bodies that will never be whole again.
WW2. Vietnam. The Chechen wars. Afghanistan. Iraq. The war in Ukraine.
Sometimes it feels like a way to cope with the horror of war.
A place where you can draw a clean line between good and evil.
And sometimes I think it’s pure magical thinking — as if I could protect these drawn boys with my aesthetics.
Turn the horror into bright colors and confident lines, so that real pain — like in that amputation artwork or in O’Brien’s books — never touches them.
I create a world where they don’t have to die in a combat zone, because in my world a combat zone is just an effective composition.