War Decor

You can’t go far into a Bed Bath and Beyond, a consignment shop or anywhere on Pinterest without seeing them.  Homely saying based around love, life and happiness for the domestic setting.  They’re simple, direct and strangely compelling to look at.  Over the last few months I’ve had an idea brewing for a different breed of word based decor, a design project for the military household and for the service member.  Something I’ve come to call “War Decor”.

Feeling emboldened by my Deployed series pillows, I’ve been looking for a new direction to move with decorations.  As a result I’ve been putting together a collection of prints, shirts and pillows that draws from mottos, sayings, unit slogans and quips from everyday military life.

With so many units and sayings to draw from, this series is only getting started.  At the moment, the focus is Army and Marines, but I’m fully intending to dive into Navy and Air Force in the near future as well (my Wife being Navy and my brother in law being Air Force!).  But even the military historian/enthusiast will be able to find a little something in this collection as I have been diving into US military history with famous quotes from leaders like General Patton and Major Winters.

I’m really excited to have this project up and running, and can’t wait to see where it goes from here.  Be sure to head over to the shop on society6 and check out the rest of the work posted there!  In the mean time, I’ll be knee deep into collecting more sayings and mottos for future designs!  If you have suggestions, be sure to leave a comment or shoot me an email!

Normandie

Normandie, approx 9″x11″ woodblock print, waterbased ink on 98lbs paper.  First Proof.

The images of the US assault on Normandy beach have stuck with me from the first day I ever saw them.  Visceral and engaging they haunt my mind with ease.  To see the stills in motion during the film Saving Private Ryan created a sense of longing inside of me to do something that meant half as much as what the men who sacrificed so much on those beaches had.  I could thank Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg for sparking that sense of patriotism within me at a young age.

I wanted to capture some of the emotion I have for that day and the images from it in a woodcut.  There’s something more to this process than say drawing it or painting it.  The cuts have to be felt through the wood and the mindset as you cut all the more important because when you drift, you make mistakes.  In this, the ‘mistakes’ are the only additions to the image, a result of drifting into thought as I worked on it.  Thinking of the men in the image and if they made it out alive.  Thinking to my own friends and colleagues who didn’t through our own trials.

I plan to do a small run of this plate.  This proof gives me hope that the rest will come out even better with a little more control over the climate in the room I end up printing in.