Photo by Kelli Tungay
I read an article about this artist who said that since the war started in ’02 he’s been collecting those tiny photos of dead soldiers, the ones they put in the papers every week. He says he can see the dead kid’s hope, he calls it, when he stares long enough at one of those photos, and then he paints it in watercolor on a piece of that stiff paper and writes the name of the dead soldier at the bottom of the painting so he doesn’t lose track of whose it is. He’s got something like four hundred of these finished paintings stacked and hung in his apartment. Says he’d like to finish the project but can’t seem to get the paintings done as fast as he used to since now when he looks at the photos all he can see is the face.
