Iraq veteran Rick Lawson's "War Experience Project" will be holding an artists' reception from 6 to 10 p.m. Saturday, November 13, at their new gallery location at 906 Broadway in Tacoma, Washington.
Lawson is a 27 year old OIF combat veteran, who came back when he was 22. Together with his wife, who has a degree in human services, he created an art project that depends on moving beyond words to express truths about combat experience and what it was like. Veterans who are artists from every war are invited to participate.
For an insight into Lawson's project, watch this moving, Emmy award-winning video by Seattle's King 5's John Sharify, linked here. The segment is called, "What's It Like to Be in Combat?" and that's one of the most irksome questions Lawson used to get asked, too many times. He turned to art for the answer.
Lawson says, "Very often veterans are put in the position of answering questions," but through the art experience, "We are putting veterans in the position of speaking on their own terms. Since words are often misinterpreted or cannot convey the experience properly, we are using artistic expression to speak" instead.
The artists' reception will feature the work of "veteran artists" Erick Schmidt, Christian Hamilton, Patricia France, and Al Thompson, along with numerous others. The program has gallery space for a few months, and will be selling arts and crafts created by veterans.
If you watch the moving interview with Rick Lawson, above, you'll see how difficult it is to "have to talk" about combat experiences. Lawson's evident frustration with baring his soul about what often can't be told reminded me of a conversation I had a few years ago with another combat veteran, Steve Piscitelli, from a different war -- Vietnam. I wrote about it on this site at the time, but I'll excerpt below what we said, because it relates so exactly. (The full article is linked here.)
From 2008:
"Recently I interviewed a former Marine, Vietnam veteran Steve Piscitelli, who said that when he first was treated at the VA for PTSD in the course of the Vietnam war, his psychotherapists at the VA wanted to discuss standard psychological topics, such as his childhood, and how he felt about his parents, when he was aching in his desire to discuss what he believed was affecting him -- THE WAR. Eventually, Piscitelli turned to making art about his experiences -- to convey the images he remembered from war -- in an effort to turn the conversation with the therapist around, and focus more on what he believed the bigger issues were.
Doing this -- literally, making art from war -- created a breakthrough in Piscitelli's therapy, he says. Suddenly, what he'd been wanting to express was being understood. From that day forward, he's made art on his own, often using it to purge the images he remembers, and destroying the art once it's "function" has been served. At the same time, he's gone on to study art formally, and has become a sculptor, who vacillates between images of great aesthetic beauty (in his case, the form of ballerinas) and the most hideous images available to him, which come straight from his subconscious mind in the form of memories he carries with him from Vietnam."
