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.
Why?
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.
Artist: Liesel_rosa
