The Art of War Marine combat artist brings back a soldier’s-eye view of Iraq, Afghanistan

When Staff Sgt. Michael Fay left for the Middle East in January 2002, he took his helmet, flak jacket, weapon, sketchpad, drawing pencils and paints. It’s not unusual, after all, for soldiers engaged in war to take photographs, sketch scenes or write poetry in their spare time. But the United States Marine Corps ordered Fay, a trained artist and art educator, to go to the Middle East as a combat artist. His job was to travel among his fellow Marines in Afghanistan and Iraq, record his impressions and create works of art for the permanent collection of combat art at the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C.

Fay’s watercolor and oil paintings, as well as pencil sketches, are the subject of a controversial show called “Fire and Ice: Marine Corps Combat Art from Afghanistan and Iraq,” running through March 27 at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland. The 31 works, which have never been on display in a nongovernmental venue before now, depict Marines guarding posts, talking to Iraqis, preparing flares and working in the field. It also includes portraits of soldiers as well as landscapes dotted by military vehicles and encampments. A central glass cabinet displays Fay’s sand-worn and sweat-stained flak jacket, helmet, goggles, backpack and paint set.

When the show opened earlier this week, anti-war activists picketed in front of the museum protesting the wars and what they called the show’s “implicit support” for those wars.

Fay, who lives in Fredericksburg, Va., and has a teen daughter in Old Town, attended the opening and is staying in the Rockland area for a month to do outreach for the show, to attend the Camden Conference about the Middle East on Feb. 25-27, and, on behalf of the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation where he works, study the organizational practices of the museum. On Sunday, he met with protesters and invited them into the gallery to view his art, meeting his goal to share his artwork and the protesters’ desire to be heard.

“I want to open up dialogue about the real issues,” said Matthew Clark, one of the protesters. Clark is a former Marine turned activist who runs a Rockland-based discussion group about corporate power. “These wars raise issues about who controls us all.”

Several days later, Fay seemed unshaken by the protest. He supports the right to free expression, he said, as long as it also extends to him.

“I think my art speaks to a certain truth,” he said. “It is what it is. But being engaged in a political discussion is not what I’m about. My focus is art.”

As a Marine who served during Operations Desert Shield, Desert Storm, Eastern Exit (in Somalia) and Provide Promise (in the former Yugoslavia), he is also trained in the art of war.

Art and war, of course, have been paired for as long as humans have sought to record their experiences visually – on cave walls, in cathedrals, as monuments. Francisco Goya, Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent and Picasso portrayed war. But it’s rare and, most would agree, surprising for the military to actively commission artist-soldiers to take their easels into a war zone. The paintbrush might be mightier than the sword in some arenas but not on the battlefield.

Fay, who once had long hair and a beard, is proud to carry both a sketchpad and a 9-millimeter pistol. He has a degree in art education from Penn State University and a stack of military service bars pinned on his uniform over his heart. He loves the art museums of Paris and being on active duty in Iraq. When he served on the president’s helicopter squadron in Washington during the 1980s, Fay was also recognized by the National Trust for Historic Preservation for the high-quality craftsmanship he put into making hillbilly twig chairs.

The juxtapositions don’t bother him. In fact, he likes challenging the traditional stereotype of the Marine as macho leatherneck. Since he was a boy, he dreamed of living and working as an artist. He won prizes and awards, but couldn’t find a professional avenue into the field. As an adult, he continued to paint, but life’s demands got in the way. In 2001, he was struggling to recover from a divorce, make child-support payments and do art. It was the Marine Corps that made his dream possible. He re-enlisted after showing his art to another officer, who told him about the Marine Corps Art Program, which had been mostly dormant since the Vietnam War but is being slowly reinstituted.

In 1942, the Marine Corps established a formal art program to “keep American citizens informed of their Marines’ actions overseas,” according to Charles Grow, curator of the Washington-based Marine Corps Combat Art Collection, which includes 8,500 works dating from 1820. Grow, who makes recommendations for the unusual post, said other military branches also deploy combat artists. Not all of the 350 artists who have contributed to the Marine Corps collection have served in the military, although most have been infantry officers, communication officers, pilots or others serving in the corps. At the moment, the Marines have no combat artists deployed in the field, said Grow.

“It’s not a big program in any of the services,” said Grow, a retired Marine, “but it’s a record of the operations and training. When we dispatch an artist, our standing order is: Go and experience the area and record what you see. That’s the strength of the collection. Collectively, the works are a visual record of the human side of it – the waiting, the suffering, the building of soccer fields and fences. This way, the American people get to see a side of the Marine Corps usually only seen by the Marines. The media takes a lot of pictures and tells a lot of stories, and [journalists] write it from [their] own perspective. But we think if we’re going to have an authentic historical record, it’s important to record everything that happens.”

Fay’s works by no means record “everything” – by his own estimation – but they do record his impressions, and the distinction is important. He’s on the ground as an artist, not as a journalist. And just as a news story about a suicide bomber might not tell of a school being built in the next town, Fay’s art focuses on day-to-day life for the Marines rather than the battles, casualties and the horrors of war. The topics, he said, are his choice based on his own artist’s sense of light, color and balance.

As a reservist, Fay spends half his life as a civilian. He calls himself a “hybrid,” who discusses his personal political positions with friends only. “But when I’m on active duty, well, it’s not that I keep my cards close to my chest, but when people ask, I say that the popular press does not get it right. Are they telling a lie? No. But they are telling only part of the truth.”

Which is what the protesters were accusing Fay of doing with his art. He sees it another way, however. His contact with soldiers who were 19 and looked 40 clearly affected him, and that’s what he sought to capture in the portraits in the show.

“I don’t have a lot of preconceived notions about the content,” said Fay, 51, who grew up in Pennsylvania and joined the Marines for the first time in his 20s. (He re-enlisted two more times, including in 2002 as combat artist.) “And no one has ever told me what to draw.”

Standing ramrod straight in his uniform, Fay is far more interested in talking about the art than about the politics or morality of war. In “All Eyes Down,” an oil painting of soldiers gingerly examining a minefield, most of the canvas is taken up by sky. The mood is one of concentration and quiet.

“I chose to lower and tilt the horizon line,” said Fay. “But there’s a vicarious response to art. In Smetana’s ‘Moldau,’ you feel the water. In a painting, you try to figure out: Where would I be? I chose for the viewer to be floating in the air.”

The viewer’s eyes also are “down.” An art critic might say that positioning the viewer above the subjects creates a Godlike post. It isn’t a big step from there to see why peace activists might argue that the perspective subtly suggests God is looking down on the mission with approval. But another art critic might justifiably posit that the soldiers’ body language is so tense and the landscape so vast that the painting could as easily be about the loneliness and isolation of war – even for soldiers.

In the end, it depends on the viewer’s perspective – politically, personally, spiritually.

Christopher Crosman, director of the Farnsworth, decided to mount the show after Fay dropped off a portfolio of the work last March on a visit to the museum one day when he was waiting to see his daughter. Knowing that many Maine families have relatives in the Middle East, Crosman, who served in the Coast Guard during Vietnam, decided Fay’s work was pertinent locally and culturally.

“There’s a human dimension to the works that I found compelling,” said Crosman. “It’s the vestige of a tradition I thought died out years ago. Part of the role of any museum is to present what’s happening in the culture from an artist’s point of view. I wanted to acknowledge those things are happening. Whether you are for the war or against it, the idea of showing the face of soldiers – and Mike disagrees with me on this – is to bring these men and women home safely. The more attention you can focus on this, the more it’s in your face, the more you think about it.”

On the topic of art and thinking, however, Crosman and Fay do agree.

“One thing art does is articulate,” said Fay who hopes to return to the Middle East. “Once something is articulated, it’s easier to have a dialogue about. Hopefully, art can transform. I wouldn’t expect someone to look at this and say: I want to be a Marine. I spoke with one of the protesters about my work on the day of the opening. If her ideas about someone in the military were transformed into something more human, we can count that day a success.”

“Fire and Ice: Marine Corps Combat Art from Afghanistan and Iraq” will be on display 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday through March 27 at the Farnsworth Museum of Art in Rockland. For information, call 596-6457 or visit www.farnsworthmuseum.org. Letitia Baldwin can be reached at 9908266 and aanstead@bangordailynews.net.