Nordic Response 24

I spent most of last week in the high arctic in Norway as part of a two-person team making art for the US National Museum of the Marine Corps (NMMC) collection joining in on Op Nordic Response 24. Specifically covering 1st Battalion 2nd Marines out of Camp Lejeune. ?The NMMC Combat Art program pairs active-duty Marines with civilian field artists and deploys them as a unit to anywhere Marines are actively up to stuff - to make art in the field. The program functions on two tracks. Firstly, it trains active-duty Marines as artists (taught by civilians). These Marine artists become a stable of talent to be deployed in event of major conflict. Secondly the paring creates new content for the NMMC archives, even as we train. I am here with Major Mike Reynolds, a relatively new addition to the program, who is outdrawing me most days. My role is to teach Major Mike how to see, and how to record with art. He doesn't need much teaching.

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Working as an artist for the USMC is exactly like your most fun urban sketch/plein-air holidaying, except not. We are usually horribly uncomfortable, often unwelcome (at least at first), and utterly out of place in our surroundings. Or at least I am. Not so much for Major Mike.

This time around there was no imminent enemy danger, but the mission is no less serious for the Marines learning to survive here. The weather will kill you no bother at all. The Marines of course are living in it full-time, while we just have to get out there long enough to make art, before heading back to a nice warm barracks. So, suck it up buttercup as they say… or maybe suck it up snowflake is better in this environment.

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Our first couple of days we ran into access challenges in getting out to the Marines in the field due to weather, and fragile snow roads clogged with NATO armor. So we busied ourselves in other ways. Getting stuffed with gate guard duty rotation is always the sticky end of the stick wherever you are, but standing post in predictably-no-better-than minus-15 Celsius weather is a peculiar affront. Drawing in these conditions we quickly learned narrows our subject selection to taking what we can get while we can still feel our fingers. I am utilizing hot pockets stuffed into each glove, and then a wool glove over that, drawing with a centrally heated mitten on, and it is not enough. Standing still and drawing in minus 20 degree C weather and you can feel the heat leech from your extremities.

All of our actual target Marines - in their winter camouflage - were somewhere in the mountains nearby but cut off from us. But, we had actual Marines pulling gate duty at our base camp, so we got to it. I like to think that this kind of sketch of a Marine is a true capture. The sheer boredom of the gate duty task makes itself felt in the posture, and the lack of visible flesh conveys how chuffing cold it is. We were not fully geared up ourselves, (saving a few layers for the mountains), but even so we were well wrapped, and yet it made very little difference. Standing still and drawing - the cold ate its way inwards from the extremities. Tip of the nose, tips of toes, and worst of all, the fingers. Out for a walk I would likely have stayed warm. Standing, still, I managed only about thirty minutes of drawing on each of these.

Day three and four saw us finally break in when we hopped a lift on a snowmobile convoy heading back out to the training area. I drew this of Gunner Kerr from an iphone wide angle photo. I am not proud of working from a photo. I was tempted to draw while on the back but the terrain was so wild it took both of us to keep the snowmobile upright as we drove. He is looking back over his shoulder wondering where the rest of the convoy is at. It turns out one of the snowmobiles had rolled over in the deep snow back there and Major Mike had lost his breakfast muffin forever.

After about a half-hours riding we eventually crested a rise – and were dumped into Hoth, minus the TaunTaun. There were Marines everywhere, taking part in training in how to stay alive and move through the great white vastness. The fighting part would come later. Marines in snowshoes double-timed it back and forth up hill, while Marines in skis negotiated slopes while towing sleds. Other Marines were digging snow holes to embed and camouflage tents, or erecting ice walls to shield the tents from the wind. We were suddenly in a target rich environment. With so many subjects and frigid weather it was very, very tempting to just utilise the camera - and make nice warm studio art later. But lines drawn on the paper FROM LIFE – even crappy lines – have exponentially more power and feeling than anything taken from a photo afterwards. So we dug out the sketchpads and took on what we could. A couple of Marines desperately trying to avoid frostbite by a firepit, while being berated by a corpsman. GOLD. Marines around a firepit as the sun went down and the temperature suddenly dipped. More GOLD. Our time on target was very limited, but I think that need for brevity improved our rough sketches. They were blobby and yet solid captures.

The rest of the week was a whiteout blur. We got out and got cold and made art at every opportunity. We worked every daylight hour. There were close to four of them now. On one particular day we hitched a ride in a Norwegian Army BandVagn (BV). A kind of diesel powered tracked box, pulling another tracked box. We were dumped with Alpha company who were really out in it. They were dug in on a very windy promontory overlooking deep forest all under a blanket of three to four feet of snow. To get from the BandVagn and to move beyond this point we had to don the snowshoes. Predictable hilarity would have ensued, but it was too cold to smile. The wind across the plateau dropped the temp even lower than the actual minus twenty Celsius. It was miserable for everyone involved, but the Marines still had work to do regardless. Many of them were working on getting fires going, just to take the edge off. These were not Marines who gave a hoot about what we were doing. They had other things on their minds. As one Captain said, "staying warm is your mission right now." We wandered around and just drew until we couldn’t, and then ducked into a BV to let extremities recover.

One evening, just after lunch, as the low sun dipped below the mountains we donned white camouflage and joined a snowshoe patrol sent out specifically to test the strength of the company’s defences by probing until contact. Major Mike was as nimble and stealthy as any of the Marines on the patrol as we strode through the white wilderness. In snowshoes I was about as stealthy as a one-man-band walking down an up escalator. With it being a slow stealthy approach however, there were quite a few long halts where we could attempt to sketch. This was full-blobby-mode eyes-wide-open drawing, where it most important to just speed through the big shapes and just absorb what is happening. “Faster, faster, faster,” playing in my head.

The Marines advanced to contact many times, being met by cries of "die melon-farmer die," or the more Linkedin-acceptable "run fuzzy-bunny run," until it was as close to full dark as it gets here. Whenever they paused to survey the defences from cover, I’d try and get something down on the paper. Often not much. On our final swing out and back the assault group split, and I tailed the smaller group. In the failing light I tried the old drawing-while-walking routine. In snowshoes and through thick underbrush this was peculiarly stupid. The drawing isn’t bad, but my right knee still hurts.

On another much less active day I parked myself behind a couple of Marines sitting by a fire hole dug in the snow near their tents. Major Mike was working on another scene by another firepit nearby. There is a methodical process to this. Draw the foreground Marine first, and tag a little bit of far background for reference, before moving on to the second figure. No telling when one Marine will get up to leave, or more arrive, so it is essential to get those far background reference points in early. My three Marines, became four, then five, then seven, and then finally eight.

As I drew the conversation washed over me, and I absorbed the convivial banality of Marines who know one another well. They talked of food they love and miss. One Marine talked about joining the Police when he gets out. Others teased him that he should go into politics. They argued about music. Out of nowhere someone showed up with an enormous sausage. “Good god man, be careful with that thing,” one wag says. They cut it up and started grilling it over the fire. They didn’t talk about the cold.

Our final day is a warmer one but with the added challenge of continuous heavy snowfall. The Marines are moving out to a new location. Their ability to pack up and move out in a hurry has improved every day. With the speed the challenge of drawing becomes farcical, so I concentrate on photos for a planned series of sketched portraits of Marines in mufflers. Then I settle into a live sketch of another of the borrowed Norwegian Forces BVs. Part of the command post. I love the ugly beauty of these machines. 1970s Soviet looking. The snow falls on the paper, and the pencils start to catch on the frozen flakes. I breathe them out of the way and keep drawing.

I’d say the key element to being a successful field artist with the military isn’t in overcoming the conditions (although that is a factor), but in overcoming the incongruity. This is especially true when covering operations in a conflict zone, where everyone around you is properly tooled-up and has actual serious stressful work to do, and instead your job is to take out your very unserious sketchpad. It is always so awkward to push through that incongruity.

But the museum archives are filled with sketches drawn from life by USMC artists who did exactly this – dared to sketch through that incongruity. I have seen those drawings in the collection dating back to Belleau Wood in 1918.

For me they are like artistic time travel.

If you’d like to know more about the Marine Corps Combat art Program as a civilian artist please check this link for contact with Kris Battles the artist in residence at the NMMC in Virginia. https://www.usmcmuseum.com/usmccombatartprogram.html

If you are a serving member of the USMC and you’d like to know more this is a good starting point. ?https://www.marines.mil/News/Messages/Messages-Display/Article/3045129/call-for-marines-to-serve-with-the-marine-corps-combat-art-program/

For more of Major Mike Reynolds here on Linkedin https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/mike-reynolds-aa27517a/

For more of my work (and eventually all of the work from Norway) check here. www.newsillustrator.com

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