MACHINE GUN BLUES
Abraham Hernandez Romero
having known this fate of ours so well
wandering among broken stones, three or six thousand years
searching in collapsed buildings that might have been our homes
trying to remember dates and heroic deeds:
will we be able?
George Seferis, Mythistorema, no. 22
I have my share of war trophies. My collection consists of photographs, uniforms and some random military gear that the U.S. Army didn't require to be returned, all stashed away inside an old olive drab box when I returned to the United States.
In 2003, during the initial occupation of the second Gulf war in Iraq, the Coalition Forces made their way to Baghdad. Many non combatants/civilians fled to safety into other countries leaving their homes and personal belongings behind. In 2006 I joined the U.S. Army and Operation Iraqi Freedom. By this point in the conflict multitudes of American soldiers had been deployed to the combat zone more than once.
One of these men was a squad leader in my platoon. His name was Sergeant Isaac Pedraza. My first deployment in 2007 was Sergeant Pedraza’s third tour of duty. He wasn’t alone, many senior non-commissioned officers had multiple deployments which felt comforting in a strange way. Isaac Pedraza was fresh out of high school when he joined the Army in 2002.
He was sent to Fort Benning, the home of the U.S. Infantry where he completed his basic training and Army Initial Training less than a year later he was on the front lines. Deployed in the outskirts of Karbala, on the route heading North toward Baghdad, the unit started receiving enemy gunfire from houses along the highway into the city center.
After neutralizing the enemy with fierce and accurate firepower he and some other soldiers proceeded to conduct house to house searches and cleared some of the homes. There within the residence he found some Iraqi Army uniforms, the general consensus was that they belonged to a high ranking Iraqi officer who had undoubtedly fled with his family. The following is an excerpt from my recorded conversation with him:
Abraham Romero: Why the photos? Why take them?
Sgt.Pedraza: I decided to take the pictures because, I don’t know, it’s one of those things where you... you want to try and humanize and process what’s going on. At the end of the day it’s a house, somebody lived there. It has a story....
Abraham Romero: Where were they? The photos, where were they located?
Sgt.Pedraza: We went to the house, cleared it to make sure there was nothing valuable, nothing of interest to us. Once we made sure there was nothing useful to use in our offensive we decided to check everything out. Uhmm... and those pictures caught my eye, mainly because it’s a glimpse into their lives, their culture... and just being able to have a memory of that moment is a part of why I took them.
Abraham Romero: Any other items that you remember anybody else taking?
Sgt.Pedraza: There was a lot of guns and military paraphernalia. Iraqi flags, stuff with Saddam on it.
Abraham Romero: How do these pictures make you feel now?
Sgt.Pedraza: It’s a memory dude. It’s one of those things where you’re attached to vivid memories… It was a moment in time that helped make who I am today... Me and this family never met but we, in essence, have crossed paths… They’re a part of me.
His war trophy was this package of photographs. Even though we worked together in the Army for almost three years I had no idea he had these. It wasn’t until I started thinking about the photographs I personally took with my own camera throughout the deployment to Iraq and began to consider them in a different context, about how impactful that experience was and how that material could affect my work as an artist.
I was a Mortar Qualified Infantryman in the United States Army. After completing my military service, honorably discharged, I pursued a degree in Fine Art. I put away those photographs, uniforms, and military gear for many years. The memories of my war experience were not so easy to shelve. It took years, including professional help, to develop the personal and mental skills that would allow me to revisit that place in my life and mind in a healthy manner. The bulk and vivid proof of that experience was residing in a Western Digital external hard drive that had long been put away and now I had the tools to approach the documented material from a different perspective.
The idea of recreating another battle scene of graphic goriness and violence more akin to a war trophy or shock value piece was not appealing to me. It seemed contrived, stifling, done to death.
I don’t want my work to be considered pro-war or anti-war, it’s just a documented account of my experience and my interpretation of it. The paintings and drawings I made using photos and memories from my war experience incorporate mixed media on wood panels and watercolor paper. I adhered fabric recycled from my undergraduate canvas paintings, and old service uniforms onto the wood panels.
I used a limited color palette based on the Mexican Golden-Age of cinema icons. Initially these works only involved three colors which were Paynes Grey, Titanium Buff and Naples Yellow. I expanded to include Yellow Ochre, Warm Grey and Zinc White applied with a palette knife. Palette knives allow for an expressive and broad stroke, something l feel was absolutely necessary and vital to the expression and overall presentation of the series. The palette knife was also a logical tool, in my opinion, to break forms and blur lines to give more atmospheric sensations.
Machine Gun Blues is about a real-world combat mission. The process of using the palette knife connected with my hand, using slashing, jabbing, dabbing, smearing and spackling motions, using my entire arm, enabled me to connect to these personal memories of post-traumatic stress.
Adding cold wax to the paint made the palette knife less of an esthetic tool, converting its use to more of a practical implementation towards the final product. The additives to the oil paint in the varying layers of my paintings include gunpowder and graphite powder along with the cold wax. I extracted the gunpowder from live ammunition of a variety of calibers. It is very grainy, not powdery. It adds a rough texture to the oil paint and cold wax concoction. This addition helped in the development of a distressed surface, making the finished pieces more akin to a weathered wall or billboard in an Iraqi suburb.
Living in a war zone for over a year, I depended heavily on my friends and also on my weapons. I think that going back to Iraq mentally and emotionally through the pictures, reliving some of those moments whether they be harrowing or humorous, caused a haunting nostalgia within me. In turn I channeled that emotional energy into the body of artworks that would comprise my MFA thesis exhibition at San Diego State University in 2019.
Plate 1. Squad Automatic; Oil paint, Gunpowder, Fabric, Wood panel
Squad Automatic (Plate 1) is one of the earlier works accomplished and largest oil painting in the exhibit. It is preceded by a few other works that I chose to not include in the show after meticulous editing. This work was inspired by a photograph taken of me by another service member at a J.S.S. (joint service station) in the Iraqi suburb of Adhamiyah. We were preparing to head out of the gate on a dismounted patrol and I was given the privilege to be the tip of the spear with my 249 squad automatic weapon, or SAW, with 250 rounds of ammunition attached to and another 500 in my backpack.
The memories of that day came flooding in and I remembered how much my life depended on that weapon. I had to know it intimately, disassembled and reassembled with a function check in a timely manner. “I am nothing without my weapon and my weapon is nothing without me” was drilled into me as an infantry soldier since basic training, it was a fundamental belief that could mean the difference between life and death.
Plate 2. Adhamiyah Mugshot; Oil paint, Gunpowder, Fabric, Wood panel
Adhamiyah Mugshot (Plate 2) is a clown with a pathetic look to him, an expression of sorrow or nostalgia that perhaps leads the viewer to investigate the painting further. Through the use of contrast I purposely left the area around the clown in a lighter shade of grey to draw attention but there are dark hands at the bottom corners holding the image of the clown to create some movement in the viewer's eye. One can now appreciate that there is somebody holding up a picture of the jester in a fashion much akin to that of a prison mugshot.
The original photograph was taken by me and it shows someone in uniform holding a picture of a clown over their face, similar to a mugshot. The person who was holding this picture was a friend of mine who also happened to be the youngest guy in my platoon, being only 19 years old. He was witty and humorous, kind of like our own class clown so it was almost like a portrait of his personality. Innocent and naive in a lot of ways, always taking the edge off with a wily quip after a harrowing moment. I believe there’s a guy like him in every platoon.
Plate 3. CrossRoads; Oil paint, Gunpowder, Fabric, Wood panel
CrossRoads (Plate 3) is based on a photo I took during my last dismounted patrol. Tension was high as both vehicular and pedestrian traffic flowed in high volumes throughout the streets. It was to be our last combat mission outside the wire so we had our heads on a swivel, taking meticulous precautions at all times. I snapped the picture right before we arrived back to our combat outpost, capturing my friend’s grateful yet exhausted look. Behind him was another member of my platoon, with his weapon at the low ready, showing him cautious and prepared even at the gate.
The close up of my friend and his expression is at the right panel of the painting, with the second soldier in the middle one. On the left, the third panel, there are vehicles, buildings and some palm trees. These were actually not Iraqi, this part of the painting is my view of Imperial boulevard from around the corner of my mother’s apartment in Los Angeles. I grew up there and witnessed gang violence in my youth. The reason for including this part was coming to the realization that both of these places helped make me who I am today. They are an inherent part of me and I of them. The tryptic gave me the idea to push the multi-panel idea so I did that with the photo of an Iraqi Army humvee with local national soldiers lounging on top of it.
Plate 4. Tactical Nap; Oil paint, Gunpowder, Fabric, Wood panel
Tactical Nap (Plate 4). I thought it was very curious for these Iraqi soldiers to be so relaxed in a combat zone because my training consisted of being active and alert at all times, especially out in our area of operations. Ultimately it was more often than not a good sign when the locals were seemingly relaxed and that mission ended up being uneventful.
The painting took some time to arrange and complete. After editing the image and sketching out how I envisioned the painting, I started the work by painting each panel individually. After a certain point I put them all together and tightened up the composition to adequately portray the scale of the figures in relation to the humvee.
During my deployment we were tasked to escort a retired detective from the United States along with members of the Iraqi Police to help teach them to conduct investigations. We would set out to places within our area of operations where bodies had been reported, they ended up being victims of sectarian violence in which adult males were the primary demographic. The I.P. were oblivious to any and all manners of
conducting a sweep through a crime scene. This detective taught them how to cordon off an area and document everything meticulously within the scene of the crime. During these missions I was a machine gunner and provided security for those on the ground from my humvee turret. It was a medic friend of mine that took the pictures of the victims for documentation, didactic and identification purposes. They were numerous files with multiple shots included of the victims so I sorted through them to figure out how to bring their stories out without disrespecting them as well as being aware of any potential families that may recognize them.
Plate 5. Collateral Damage; Graphite, Acrylic paint, Watercolor paper
Collateral Damage (Plate 5). The idea was to create a multi-panel mural that could effectively take over a large space, but seeing as that was just an idea I had to plan for the chance that wouldn’t work out. This potential setback inspired me to push every individual portrait to the degree that it could be displayed as a stand alone piece. When the gallery was green lighted for setting up the thesis exhibition this was the first work to go up and to my surprise it worked out as a large scale work instead of a series of individual pieces. The impact on viewers when observing this grand scale work and the meaning behind it was validating for me as an artist and a combat veteran.
Plate 6. Machine Gun Blues: Re-Up; Graphite, Acrylic paint, Watercolor pap
Machine Gun Blues: Re-Up (Plate 6) was the last work I produced for my thesis exhibition. The reference picture was taken while in a mission to provide security to Associated Press members as they filmed and gathered information in our area of operations. I had originally made a painting using this photo but it was in another exhibit at the time of my thesis exhibition. This painting was actually the first work in the series, the catalyst for the body of work. It was important for me to include it in the exhibit so I revisited it and the drawing was the end result. It felt like the series had come full circle, the feeling of closure toward the combination of different life experiences. In a lot of ways my art-making and especially this series of artworks were an integral component of my efforts to deal with post traumatic stress in a healthier way.
I am forever grateful for growing up poor, being the fourth of 6 children, as well as my voluntary integration into the armed services of this country. My state of mind was not only reinforced due to poverty, vigorous training and drilling to succeed in the face of insurmountable odds. At times to include the cost of my very life, it was forged to adapt in the face of adversity and overcome improbable odds. This mind-set fortified my personal and academic drive to become ambitious in my professional and artistic endeavors. It drove me to push myself theoretically, conceptually as well as technically.
Being a painter at heart and implementing those life lessons into the rest of my art was a natural sequence for me. Although my artworks are based on photographs, they are filtered through my memories and artistic style. I am not a photographer. I took these digital photos in a different mind-set. I was a young man in a conflict that was bigger than my understanding and I simply documented moments that were of interest to me. I had no formal knowledge of composition in regards to the art of composing an image effectively and formal photography. I also put these photographs away for many years, stashed away in the depths of an external hard drive, mainly because of my suffering of post traumatic stress disorder.
As a figurative and representational artist I found myself resisting the idea of working abstractly. I fought the notion of working loosely that my professors were pushing, however when I finally succumbed to their pressure the results were well worth it.
