Matt Mitchell Image

Steven Udovich. Civilian occupation: University Administrator From Newark, DE. Served as Army, Lieutenant Colonel, Advisor to the Iraqi Army, Al Kisek, Iraq 11/04-10/05

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In 2005, Amherst artist Matt Mitchell wanted to find out more about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, so he came up with an interesting notion: Mitchell is painting 100 portraits of people, military and otherwise, who have been involved with the wars. Many are local, including, among others: Northampton's Claudia Lefko, coordinator of the Iraqi Children's Art Exchange Project; Hadley's Sergeant Scott Palmer, a veteran of both wars; and Belchertown's Jeffrey Michael Lucey, a Marine lance corporal who suffered from post-traumatic stress after returning from Iraq and took his own life.

The result of Mitchell's undertaking, still in progress, is a remarkable collection of portraits and accompanying statements by the subjects. 100 Faces of War Experience is a group of artworks, but there's another dimension: Mitchell is in the midst of creating something along the lines of a highly personalized monument to two conflicts. That these conflicts have lasted so many years makes the in-progress nature of the undertaking seem all the more appropriate.

You can soon see many of the portraits (primarily local ones) and statements in an exhibition at the Springfield Armory, thanks in part to the efforts of the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities and Amherst's Veterans Education Project. Mitchell's portraits are best experienced in person—his oil-painting process results in stunning works that reward a close view. They glow with the kind of layering most often seen in very old paintings, and it's no wonder—in a recent piece in American Artist, Mitchell discusses techniques he learned from Rembrandt paintings.

In a recent interview, Mitchell discussed the conception and execution of his project.

Advocate: Why did you undertake this large project?

Mitchell: It's something I ask myself. I sit there at night sometimes and say, "Why am I doing this?" Because it gets to be an endurance thing. But I love doing the portraits. I love the painting, and the idea of doing something relative to the war just seems like the best thing in the world. That's one answer.

But to get to meaning—you know how this war doesn't seem to affect most people? And, if you're completely honest with yourself, does it really influence your life at all? That's what it's a reaction against. That's what this project is about.

I'm sitting there in spring of 2005, and I read a story about a guy coming home, and all of a sudden I think, "Oh my God." It could have been any story that got me, but it was this moment when I realized I have no idea [about the war]. Not only do I not have any idea about the Iraq and Afghanistan experience, but I have no idea what's happening in my own country. Take the war as a whole, and my knowledge is nowhere, my investment in it is nowhere. This is what I see, what I wanted to know. I didn't know anyone in the military, no contact whatsoever. So I think, "How am I going to find something out?" That's where the roots of the project come from. I'm looking for all perspectives and I'm trying to get beyond any kind of short-term policy idea, trying to make this about exploring what this war means and what it means to the American experience. That's where I've ended up.

Do you feel like you have a greater sense of the wars?

Yes, absolutely. [I] end up having candid conversations with veterans. I get a special window. The people I'm working with know that I'm going to be doing their portrait, and so now when I meet people, I paint with them. I'm sitting there working live. It creates this atmosphere—it's different. It's not like having coffee with someone. I encourage conversation. As an artist, if you can get people to stay still, you can get the features of their face. But if you want to actually understand who they are, it's a whole different thing. It's the difference between academic and meaningful to me. You can have the surface, or you can actually try to get some of the personality.

So we talk. We're sitting there, and they've always looked over the [whole] project at this point. I make sure that people read all of the other statements before we meet or when we're meeting so they have some things to react to, some questions they might have about other people's involvement, and I keep everything anonymous so people have privacy with the discussion.

They can express political opinions, they can express whatever they want, and it's going to be seen in a group, where they're one of many, so I'm not going to take what they say and say that's what all veterans believe in. And I'm not going to take it out of context, because they decide what they're going to say. They're the ones manipulating context. ... You see the participants going in and saying things where they kind of reinterpret everything that's gone before.

What might be an example of that?

Chad Anderson's statement—he's a real gung-ho guy. He's one of the latest guys, and he was looking through my stuff, and most of the people who had combat experience were very negative. He has very heavy combat experience, but one of his roles is to keep people in the military.

While I'm sitting there painting him at the armory in Hartford—a National Guard installation, and I'm sitting there painting him—guys are coming in, and he's saying, "I haven't seen you for a while. Are you going to join up again and come back?" ... This is who Chad is. He writes his statement and he acknowledges all the difficulties that people face—and everyone who reads the statements can get something different—but he was very forceful about how he believes it's the right thing. And he throws that into the discussion. It's a huge part of who the military is. Now we've got that in there, and the next people who come along are going to react to that.

Are there common threads you've discovered in these stories?

There are some things that have become common knowledge that really surprised me at the outset. I have a small sample—it shouldn't be that I know so many people who know people who have committed suicide, friends who have committed suicide after returning. That is a huge thing. It's more recognized now, but that is a very deep thing for the people who are trying to figure out their own heads about what happened. The fact that this is happening at the level that it is is really serious.

That's the thing: emotional awareness of war. This is something that comes through when you're looking at the portraits and the statements that wouldn't come through if you're only looking at the paintings—it's like an unstated undercurrent that when you talk with people about war and you're talking candidly, you're not trying to get toward any political thing or you've let it be known that you can hear anything. You start to hear these undercurrents of, essentially, how it's a horrific thing. You get this experience of looking at people who have looked this thing in the face. It can be pretty intense. That, as the emotional experience of war, is very different than what you expect coming in.

When I first came into this project, when I first came into talking with veterans, I had a desire to hear war stories. I knew that there was something problematic about the desire. I knew that I shouldn't be excited by hearing stories like, "Hey, we went out in the Humvee and the one in front of us blew up and people were shooting guns at us." I'm not into that. I'm not into war movies particularly. I don't even really like action movies in general. But there's this desire when you know someone who's stepped outside of our normal existence and they've seen all kinds of crazy shit. You want to hear it. You want to get to that. It's problematic, because those stories are often not what's terribly meaningful in the present context to the person who's telling the story. ...

Listening to the things that are not about combat, not about excitement, is much harder. It involves more people. You have loads of people over there who weren't officially in combat roles. That's the majority. Then you have the situation where the distinction between combat and non-combat is completely blurred, where anything outside the wire is combat, essentially. So then you have truck drivers who are dealing with IEDs, and that's essentially the combat of this war. Getting past what you think a war story is is a big thing....

What draws the veteran to creating a narrative arc? Putting a punchline, having a cap on the story, that's not easy. You talk to people who are fresh back from things, and you get a lot of chaotic thoughts. I've talked to [author and veteran] Tyler Boudreau a lot about this. Creating the narrative, for him, has been almost like a life-saving practice of organizing his thoughts. One of the things he says in his book, to paraphrase it, is, "Each revision to the manuscript was like a revision to his conciousness."

After an era in which the government didn't allow pictures of coffins returning, for instance, and intentionally tried to minimize the perception of being at war, your project seems to offer a candid look at how people are really affected.

How is that sense of remove created? I think the volunteer army is a huge cultural dynamic. It is just a massive, massive shift. We've gone from declaring war as a culture to still declaring war as a culture, but only some people have to be involved. People often use that as a springboard to think about reinstating the draft. I think that's a logical fallacy. There are many options besides reinstating the draft to get everyone involved.

Here I am, working on this project, and I've had these openings where, you know, it's an art opening, and I'm used to having openings in art school, where it's great, there's wine and cheese, you talk about crazy stuff. People go to see this, and it's about the war. People are crying....

I've described it to people and they say, "I know I should go, but man, that's going to be a real downer."

You got it. It's going to depress you. It feels right that this is true, but what's that about? Why do we have to fill in this need? We have to fill in, I think, this acknowledgement of the war. In many ways I preferred not to. It's more peaceful. You feel your powerlessness a little bit less. ... These are big events, by any standard, any measure, the biggest cultural events of our time—1.6 million people deploy, those people return, they have families, all the money, the future for foreign policy... this is a huge part of our economy, this is a defining moment of our time, and it's been happening longer than the economic collapse. How can people comfortably ignore this? I think you can most comfortably ignore it when you feel powerlessness.

You look back at the beginning of this war—the largest protest in human history hardly makes the news. The groundwork that was laid for activism by Vietnam seems completely ineffective.

You get this sense of inevitability. The ball has started rolling. That's it. At a certain point, why pay attention? It's so much more confortable to actually say, I can do nothing. I will be good in my own life. I'll try to encourage a peaceful way of life. I'll raise my family, work for cultural awareness, diplomacy over war, that type of thing.

Have people expressed any reluctance to participate because of political concerns?

The reluctance takes different forms. What I've seen more, what participants are likely to do, is take it as a challenge. I say, "I've got my views, and you say whatever you want. If you want to say something completely different, if you want to turn things around, give it your best shot." This is something that people respond to.

There's one guy, Udovich [on the cover], the guy who's got the full battle gear on. He pulls out his diary entry about the elections, and it ends with a statement. Paraphrasing again: "There are many people with different views about this war. If they were in Mosul in January 2005, they would have a very different opinion." He's just observed the [Iraqi] elections and he's awestruck. It feels like everything he's been doing—these 40 combat missions—is worth it.

Do you openly discuss your views about the war with your subjects?

It gets beyond views pretty quick. One thing people in the military don't see is how much people within the military might talk to each other about these issues. ...When they're active duty, what they say can be extremely tightly controlled, in terms of what they can say to the public.

However, amongst themselves, many of the participants have talked about these conversations that they'd have. Some people are real hawks and some people are essentially doves when it comes to these particular wars. They had the conviction that they were not right going in, but they went anyway and served with these people who have wildly different views.

Think about that atmosphere—there you are, you're going to go out on a mission where there might be questionable ethics. And questionable ethics run a huge gamut. Imagine those conversations.

So for me to come in saying I have a certain view and I'll paint your portrait, that's kind of light.

Have your views changed because of this project?

Not as far as the morality of pre-emptive war. The idea of pre-emptive doctrine in our foreign policy—it seems to be against the code of a lot of what people have signed up for in the military. That hasn't changed.

When I talk to people about viewpoints they say, "I've got my view." And I say, "You know what the project is about because you've seen the project. You can write whatever you want, whatever you think is missing."

The project is about this collectively created view. There's a simpler way to say that, I'm sure, but the project isn't my perspective. I'm here, and I will try and do you justice in a portrait, and you take the reins."

100 Faces of War Experience: May 1-June 13. Reception: Saturday, May 2, 3 p.m. with Matt Mitchell, Iraq veteran Tyler Boudreau, classics scholar Dr. Robert Meagher and Vietnam veteran the Rev. James Munroe, dean of Springfield's Christ Church Episcopal Cathedral. Springfield Armory, One Armory Square, Suite 2, Springfield, (413) 734-8551.