Skip to main content

Homesick (x2)

Sometimes We Feel Like Going Home
12" x 24", oil on wood panel, 2014

Sometimes I Feel Like Going Home
20" x 16", oil on canvas, 2014

The average age of the Canadian soldier in World War One was 26 years. Now imagine leaving your home in the city or country, crossing the Atlantic, and being thrust into a conflict you can't fully understand. Before 1917 when Canada enforced conscription, everyone went (more or less*) willingly, but nobody any any concept of the scale this war would eventually reach in violence, horror, duration, casualties, boredom, technical challenges, and on and on and on.

Apart from research of firsthand accounts, my inspiration while painting these two came from "Home" by Roger Waters (the single soldier painting borrows it's title from a line in that song) and "The Day After Tomorrow" by Tom Waits. Look them up.

In the Calamity section of my WWI painting project, these are the last two (or first two, depending on your perspective) of a group of three paintings that includes The Theatre of War.






*Of course, propaganda and peer pressure played a large role in convincing/shaming young men into going; you were heading for a grand adventure! it'll be over by Christmas! are you a real man or not? your chums are fighting, why aren't you?**

**This last one is an actual tagline from a propaganda poster

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Axel Foley's Chevy Nova (1/25 scale model)

Multiple tributes, here. I remember first seeing  Beverly Hills Cop  on video at my friend Chris K's house, 'cause his family had a VCR and we'd watch tons of movies (and record music videos) together. The summer of 1984 was a special time for us (having created a strong bond in school since Grade 6 a few years before), going on biking adventures around the 'burbs and into the city, etc., and home video played an important role from then until I moved to the opposite end of Scarborough just before we started high school. We liked the movie a lot, both of us fans of Eddie Murphy from his  Saturday Night Live  days. I don't think I'd seen the movie since then (it would have been 1985, probably summer, since the movie came out in late 1984) and I became curious to see if it still held up. It did. It does. I found Murphy as charming as ever and the comedy (and even the action) holds up very well and its very re-watchable and very entertaining.  Beverly Hi...
7 comments
Read more

Time Travel Helmet

The theme for this year's Firelight Lantern Festival is The Time Machine , and Krista and I were going to put together steampunk-inspired costumes for ourselves (which is why the helmet's painted in hammered bronze), but, after shooting the announcement video (second video at the bottom of this post) I decided I'd look better with a lab coat, bow tie, and goggles for a generic 20th Century scientist look. I'd previously built a jetpack as sci-fi costume accessory for stiltwalking purposes back in 2015, so if I were to combine this helmet, the jetpack, and my refurbished blaster and I'd have a pretty good, mostly homemade, sci-fi costume for...something...down the line... Creature! It sorta looks like a weird electronic sea cucumber or sea anemone from the top. More dieselpunk than steampunk; I like it. They were originally crystal clear plastic, but I sanded the insides and outsides to better disperse the light from the LEDs (which I bought, pre-wired...
Post a Comment
Read more

YT-1300 Freighter w/Cargo Carriage (scale model), Part 1

For a couple of decades, now, I'd been curious about two things concerning the Millennium Falcon: what it looked like as a brand new, unmodified ship ...and how exactly did it work as a "freighter," anyway? That other build takes care of my curiosity about the ship, this one takes care of my curiosity about the freighter question... Hail, Bandai. Bandai Star Wars kits are amazing. Their larger models are super detailed, but even these tiny kits (the Falcon here is about 1/350 scale) are superior to many previous and current Star Wars kits by MPC, AMT, or Revell. Mini sprue tour. Interestingly, this version of the Falcon is the one from Star Wars , having only three landing gear boxes (two more were added to the front for Empire ), but the larger version I built as factory stock had five because it was the version from The Force Awakens . My only (very minor) complaint is that these smaller kits only have stickers instead of decals (the larger kits...
1 comment
Read more