Afghanistan

Afghanistan. For years it has plagued my mind. Misery, war, and oppression are full-time occupants of countries the world over. This picture could be of anywhere. Substitute a Janjaweed gunman for the Taliban soldier or change the woman and child to Rwandans, and the subject changes, but the commentary stays the same. Yet, in my own consciousness Afghanistan is the poster boy of mass tragedy.

2001 was the year Afghanistan’s troubled history was put to rest and the citizens could begin to regain the peace and prosperity the country enjoyed just decades ago. At least that’s what appeared to be the case. As the war trudged on my illusions were dispelled. It happened to a lot of people.

A new government to provide the same old shit. After learning this was the second time in the past half-century the middle-eastern nation had been “liberated” by the U.S. to no apparent benefit, I began to see the country as a beacon of hopelessness. Staunch pessimism is not helpful. I know conditions can improve, but just a glance at recent history shows there is plenty of hell to endure before that happens. It’s that state of hopeless hell that I wanted to encapsulate in this picture.

The mother and her child stand in for the masses of victims and are the core of the picture’s emotional force. So significant was the plight of these two that all the other elements were composed to point directly to them. I distorted the people with the hope that the focal point attain the power of a black-hole, all surrounding things being sucked in.

Visual distortion is not new to my work, but here it is more extreme than usual, a carry-over from The Looming Classroom. I admire works that replicate reality with photographic accuracy, but at heart I’m an expressionist. Only by deviating from the way our retinas tell us things look can I show how things really are. For that reason I chose to keep research minimal. Browsing the internet provided pics of Taliban soldiers, military weaponry, and other pertinent items. Such assorted reference material was meant to provide believability, but would never hold dominion over artistic vision.

Now, to whether the picture actually works. The final verdict remains with you guys, however my feeling is negative. Afghanistan* doesn’t rank with my best. The best to be said of it, by me that is, is that it will be a marker in my oeuvre of when ink staked claim as medium of choice, and not just convenient tool for sketching and cartooning. It was a last minute decision to forsake graphite for the less forgiving medium, but I enjoyed the experience. Of course, there’s lots of practice in my future, but the range of values I’ve achieved is none too shabby.

That’s the good, now the bad. First off, the style isn’t consistent. In the beginning I scratched and scribbled like I do with my comics, but the picture demanded increased detail and my style adjusted until it transformed into deliberate cross-hatching.

I’m disappointed in my execution of distorting the people (and the F-16). It’s hard for me to judge. A nagging feeling tells me some folks won’t see reality warped to underline meaning. Instead they’ll think who ever drew this needs a training course on drawing correct proportions. Perhaps the terrified woman on the right will be mistaken for a hook-nosed witch (something which has happened once already) and it wouldn’t be totally insane to think the bald commie is a genie (maybe that wouldn’t be a bad thing).

Problem number one is the sparseness. Big stretches of negative space are fine. In a picture about war vast empty expanses of paper could evoke hovering doom. Here the naked surface of the illustration board is unfinished artwork. Afghanistan as it was born in my imagination is a convulsing mass of violence. A world teeming with murderers, where the noise of screaming and gunfire form an unbearable atmosphere. Bad planning and impatience led to what you see here: a third of an idea realized. As passionate about the subject as I was, I never managed to assemble all the pieces into a something complete. The more I’m conscious of what I want to convey the more difficulty I have in conveying it (The Looming Classroom is an exception).

Also, for what reason I am not sure, but I colored the tips of the bullets too dark. They look like lipstick tubes. God. Damn. It.

Ink, 2011

_{*The full title of the piece is Afghanistan in the Flames of Hell}