Art offers insight to war aftermath
The soldier stares straight out from the painting, James Dean-handsome but war-ravaged, lying in a hospital bed holding an X-ray of his spine held together by metal.
Michael Fay remembers painting him.
“He was possibly the most damaged person I met, physical and mentally,” Fay said of the soldier depicted in the artwork leaning against a gallery wall. “He had been in and out of hospitals for nine years.”
“His eyes were so bloodshot I asked him, ‘You got pinkeye?’ He said, ‘No. I was up all night sobbing uncontrollably.’”
Every picture here has a story. The Joe Bonham Project is a collection of portraits of grievously wounded soldiers made by a group of combat and civilian artists. Fay is its founder and director.
The project has travelled the U.S. since it began in 2011.
It is art that bears witness and records sacrifice, said Fay, who named the project after the devastatingly wounded character in Dalton Trumbo’s war novel, Johnny Got His Gun.
“These guys, the moment before they got blown up, they were at the height of their manhood,” he said. “Now they’re completely vulnerable. . . . They spend their day looking at their torn bodies.”
But the artworks are only part of the project. The other part was the experience of creating them, the hours the artists spent with the soldiers in hospitals, talking, observing and sketching.
The soldiers who participated were eager to do so, Fay said; they wanted their stories told.
“I was very nervous,” said Fay, a former Marine Corps combat artist. “I’m going into these hospital rooms with these guys who are pretty messed up. There are ostomy bags, festering wounds, pain, sweat. It’s bad enough when it’s your own family members, and here I am going into these people’s lives.”
But the soldiers held nothing back. As the artists sketched, the soldiers talked — of their combat experiences, their wounds, their fears.
“There’s an intimacy,” Fay said. “When you draw someone, you draw them out.”
Around him at the museum were the results.
There is a portrait of a Marine whose face is so scarred it almost looks handsewn.
And one of another Marine, whose injury left him perpetually salivating, depicted with a towel in his mouth. Next to him, the artist has written the soldier’s daily therapy schedule and some of his thoughts: “Can I eat steak again? ‘Cause I really like steak.”
An enormous, arresting painting shows a medical team trying to save a deathly white soldier.
It is an almost classical tableau anchored by a woman in blue scrubs kneeling on the soldier’s chest as she pounds on it.
The artist, who witnessed the actual scene, told Fay that the team kept going until the chaplain told personnel to stop, that the soldier was dead.
Is it all too unbearably depressing?
“You know, at first I thought so,” said gallery coordinator Destinee Oitzinger, who helped hang the exhibit. “I wasn’t quite sure where I was landing on this.”
But now she finds herself moved at the way the artists got to know the soldiers and depicted them as full, complex people.
“This is someone with a name, a future, a history — someone with struggles, someone with victories,” she said. “This is not about wounded veterans but people with a lot of depth.”
It is about reality, said Josh Mooi, who was also helped ing hang the exhibit — and is a veteran of one of the Marine units where Fay was embedded, and was honored with the Navy Cross.
“A lot of people go to see war movies; they know those people are actors,” said Moo “But these are real people. This is somebody. It’s not based on a true story; it is a true story.”