This Military Basic Training Is in Art
Recruiting posters, maps and diagrams, and animation.
BY DANIEL GRANT
Wednesday, October 18, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
FORT MEADE, Md.--Few military jobs are as dull as barracks duty, where a soldier's main requirement is to stay awake for hours on end, checking IDs and making sure everyone is behaving. To keep herself from falling asleep, Marine Cpl. Annette Kyriakides Spurgeon "doodled." Actually, it was probably a little higher level drawing than that, because "someone saw me sketching, and that person told someone else, and it went up the chain of command." Within weeks, Cpl. Spurgeon was assigned to the military's Defense Information School (known as Dinfos) at Fort Meade, Md., where she received training to be an artist.
The military uses artists in a variety of roles. Most create recruiting posters, maps and diagrams, and animation for interactive military-training software, but some also produce combat art. Those soldiers will go into the field with a platoon, drawing and painting scenes of military life. While "combat art" is the term used, images of actual combat are actually quite rare--the pictures largely show soldiers on patrol, relaxing at base camp, in formation, training, mingling with the population, or the view from a fighter jet or a naval gunboat.
One evocative work, which could be mistaken for a French 19th-century landscape but for the armored military vehicle in the background, is Sgt. Elzie Golden's 2002 "Tracking bin Laden." With mountains in the distance and a cloud-inflected sky above, the vehicle wades through a shallow stream while an Afghan peasant walks on foot leading his pack-laden donkey in the foreground. Both soldiers and peasant--neither looking at each other--go about their seemingly routine business.
Collecting art, and assigning individuals to combat art duty, is not new in the military. The Army's now 15,000-strong art collection dates back to World War I, when the military commissioned a group of eight artists in the Corps of Engineers to record the activities of the American Expeditionary Forces in France. That artwork was stored in the Smithsonian Institution. During the World War II, the Corps of Engineers established a war art unit, consisting of 42 artists (23 on active duty and 19 civilians) to document the military campaign. By the end of the war, the collection had grown to 2,000 works of art, and a museum was eventually established to house it.
All five branches of the military now have their own military art collections. The Marine Corps has an art collection of more than 7,000 drawings, paintings and sculpture; the Air Force, 9,000; the Coast Guard, 2,000; and the Navy, 15,000. The holdings are continually added to by soldiers who got their start at Dinfos, which also provides instruction to selected recruits in communications, journalism, photography and videography. The art students have 66 days to learn what their civilian counterparts at art academies may take four years to acquire but, unlike other art-school graduates, a job is waiting for them the next day. "I'm clearing 50K a year, with full medical benefits and a retirement package," said Marine Staff Sgt. Michael Fay, a full-time combat artist based in Fredericksburg, Va. "The Marine Corps holds art in much higher favor than the civilian world."
Not all art, perhaps, but certainly highly realistic art that tells some part of the story of the U.S. armed forces. Cpl. Spurgeon, 31, was assigned as a combat artist in Iraq from June 2004 to January 2005, producing numerous pencil sketches, two dozen watercolors and three oils on canvas, which are in the Marine Corps' collection. While in Iraq, she also acted as the sole courtroom artist during the first trials of soldiers accused of abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
There is an application process for the Dinfos art program, but no portfolio is required as it would be in civilian art school. Many of the students have a long pursued art interests (Cpl. Spurgeon was drawing and painting "ever since I was a little girl"), and some have significant formal training. Sgt. Golden, a 1984 Dinfos graduate and the 2002 Military Graphic Artist of the Year, attended the art school at the University of Arizona and worked as a newspaper illustrator before joining the Army at age 28 ("I wanted to do easel painting; that's why I joined the military," he said). Army Master Sgt. Sandra Keough, who heads the graphic arts department at Dinfos, joined the military in 1985 right after receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in painting from Temple University in Philadelphia, "because I had college loans to pay back, and I didn't have a job." After basic training, she was immediately assigned to Dinfos, whose art program was then at Lowry Air Force Base in Denver.
The 66-day program is broken up into three 22-day segments. The first stage is what the military calls "manual art"--drawing and painting by hand, learning color, materials and techniques. The next 22 days are devoted to computer applications for these skills, including digital illustration, animation, layout and design and the programs used in these areas. The last segment requires students to complete one or more projects, such as a PowerPoint presentation, building a Web site or creating a battlefield simulation program.
Students are in class by 7:50 a.m., ready to go, and the eight-hour-a-day, five-day-a-week sessions are more concentrated than at civilian schools. A focus on self-expression is absent from the curriculum. Where Dinfos does make concessions to the civilian world, it is in giving its students the weekends off and in treating them more gently than other recruits. "As a Marine, I've had to tone down my personality," Sgt. Robert Cook, 27, a graphics instructor at Dinfos, said. He can't just bark out orders but must maintain "a positive-reinforcement environment. It has forced me to be humane."
All military recruits take a basic vocational test to determine the occupational specialty to which they are most suited. They meet with officers who assign them placements after basic training is completed. In some cases, the placement officers "didn't even know there are artists in the military," said Air Force Technical Sgt. Jesse Justice, a Dinfos instructor, and it is even rarer that recruits know. Sgt. Justice, an Army brat (his father, Nicholas, is an active-duty brigadier general) who attended the University of Maryland, basically "needed a job and wanted to get out of the house," enlisting in the Air Force since "the lifestyle is better than in the other services." His initial plan for active-duty job placement was to be dental technician, but he happened to be carrying a group of his comic book drawings when he met with the placement officer in 1995, and that person recommended him for Dinfos.
The instincts of the placement officers must be good, since more than 95% of the students in the visual communications course complete the program, a percentage that far exceeds art-school graduation rates.
Despite the fact that all five branches of the military collect combat art and a niche market exists of people who buy portraits of famous soldiers and scenes of glorious battles at conventions and online, "military" and "artist" still is not always an easy combination. Sgt. Cook, whose combat scenes earned him the 2006 Military Graphic Artist of the Year award, noted that other Marines have referred to him as a "skater, that's a Marine with a really lax job," or have told him that "'you're not a real Marine. Real Marines are out there firing weapons or in support of it.'" Another Dinfos instructor who has occasionally been razzed as a "pencil pusher," Staff Sgt. Gregory Harrington, answers back that "I was in artillery before this. That, and the fact that I was a drill sergeant before being assigned to Dinfos, usually shuts them up."
Certainly, combat art is not easy, as both Sgt. Harrington and Cpl. Spurgeon found out. He spent three years as a member of the 55th Combat Camera unit, taking battle-scene photographs "while bullets are flying." Cpl. Spurgeon stated that she "had been begging and pleading to go to Iraq as an artist," pitching the idea with the slant that the Marine Corps "don't get a lot of females into actual combat, but they would make a big step by letting a woman go sketch."
Along with her art supplies, Cpl. Spurgeon carried a rifle, which she did fire on occasion. "There was constant small arms fire around," she said, "a lot of craziness. You have to keep your head down." While she was part of a raid in Fallujah, her Humvee was hit by a roadside bomb, which gave her a concussion ("It blocked up my ears pretty good and made me dizzy"), and a fall out of a convoy vehicle on another mission injured her back. "I had people ask me what am I doing here as an artist." Fortunately for her, she needn't choose between soldiering and art. "Artists are a dime a dozen; not everyone can be a Marine."
Mr. Grant is author of "The Business of Being an Artist" (Allworth).
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