World War Two
2022
Mixed media on canvas
80cm x 80cm
31 1/2" x 31 1/2"
Contribution
Continues World War One's reactivation of the Art Collision 'unrepeated hybrid mode' (visible photograph and visible hand-worked paint on one surface), but with a further distinction identified this session: where Art Collision achieved this hybrid through digital compositing (photograph → Photoshop → print → paint on top), Mediums of War achieves it through direct physical photo-transfer with no digital compositing step at all. The hybrid mode returns with the computer deliberately removed — read as a formal statement in its own right, examining photographic history through a technique that goes backward past digital manipulation to a handmade relationship with source photographs.
Intent
A painting examining how the recording medium doesn't just document war but actively manufactures the moral narrative attached to it — using color photography (WWII's dominant recording medium, versus WWI's black-and-white) and a central quoted image (the Khaldei Reichstag flag photograph) known to be staged and darkroom-edited.
Direct inspiration
Same medium-per-era concept established for World War One (b&w photography for WWI, color photography for WWII, film stills for Vietnam), planned before compositional decisions. The horizon line's height was also planned in advance, across all three paintings, to drop progressively from WWI to WWII to Vietnam as war becomes increasingly airborne with technological escalation — confirmed as pre-visualization at the sketching stage, not a retrospective reading.
Making
Made 2022, A Colorful History, second work in the 'Mediums of War' sub-series. World War One was painted first; the connecting technique (lines and shadows linking discrete photo-fragments) originated and was refined within World War One itself, forced into existence under the density pressure of that painting's bottom rows, and carried forward into World War Two already-refined rather than invented fresh. [Correction: supersedes the sequence previously recorded in World War One's makingNote, which stated the row-layout scaffolding was worked out in World War Two and confirmed in World War One — the artist has now clarified World War One was painted first.] The horizon line was placed first in both paintings, before the surrounding composition was built — in World War Two, the Khaldei flag/ruined tower became a 'confirmed piece' during placement and the rest of the composition was consciously built around it once its significance was noticed, unlike World War One's horizon, which had no equivalent anchor-image to build around. The richer color palette creates sharper contrast and more distinct paint boundaries between adjacent photographs than World War One's black-and-white paint fields — not tighter physical placement, a reading the artist corrected mid-session.
Where it went
The palette escalation across the triptych was planned in advance: World War One muted (b&w) → World War Two bright-but-restrained → Vietnam intended brighter still, with World War Two's restraint consciously held in anticipation of Vietnam. The plan partially failed — the reds at the bottom of the canvas exceeded the intended restraint, attributed by the artist partly to habits from his pre-ACH painting style. Retroactively re-read as formally justified: the brightness sits beside a US Chemical Warfare Service smoke-bomb-handling photograph (yellow canisters, men in protective suits), so the excess brightness now reads as picking up energy from the hazard imagery rather than as a failure of restraint.
In the practice
Second work in the 'Mediums of War' sub-series of A Colorful History, following World War One and preceding Vietnam War in Video Stills (BB-ACH-2024-002, 2024, partially catalogued only — see session notes). A fourth, unrealized member of the sub-series (drawings, black-and-white, era undecided) was conceived but never made.
Process
The bottom-row connecting technique (lines, shadows) carried over from World War One already-refined, rather than being reinvented. The two black boxes from World War One (bottom-middle, beside soldiers in bunkers, read this session as ambiguous, hidden 'thought or something close to it' — competing/uncertain planning) consolidate to a single black box in World War Two, sitting alone on open ground beside the ruined flag tower — read as a single, resolved, exposed decision replacing World War One's hidden, doubled uncertainty. The box motif continues evolving in Vietnam (see Vietnam artwork record, partial): two boxes recur there, but fused directly into the photographic imagery itself (dark, near-silhouette combat photographs with solid black lower portions) rather than existing as a separate mark beside the photographs, sitting directly above Vietnamese farmer-militia manning an anti-aircraft gun.
What this isn't
As with World War One, rejected false continuity between composited photographs — paint connects and contains discrete photo-fragments without erasing their individual legibility.
In the series
Sits within A Colorful History as the second work of the 'Mediums of War' sub-series. Retrospectively connected this session to the Art Collision series at the level of underlying idea, not just hybrid technique: the established Four Nations throughline (photograph as the fixed/settled register, paint as the register that keeps something open) is read as operating here against a much larger target than Art Collision's original context — the historical photographic record itself, rather than a single foreclosed prophecy story. The Global Peace Walk 2000, already on record as Art Collision's philosophical origin point, is identified this session as the shared root beneath both series — the same peace-oriented conviction, applied twenty-plus years later to a direct examination of war, with an explicit stated intent (see statement-throughlines) that the paintings help viewers 'look again and remember that we need peace.'
Source material
51 archival photographs (entries 60-111 of the combined Mediums of War source list, continuing directly from World War One's numbering). Distribution reverses World War One's Allied weighting: German-sourced material is the largest single bloc (~22 of 51 entries, including several credited directly to the Propagandakompanie), versus ~13 US-sourced; remainder spreads across Finnish (5), Soviet (2, including Khaldei), Canadian (2), and Japanese-subject material (4). This skew is partly a technical artifact rather than a curatorial choice: Agfacolor, a German invention, was in wide use by German war photographers by the early 1940s, while American combat photography largely stayed black-and-white — meaning the side of the conflict history remembers as 'good' is underrepresented in the painting's own native color-photography record. At least four source images (of the color-appearing set) are noted as modern digital colorizations of black-and-white originals rather than period color, complicating the color-as-WWII's-native-medium premise. Named individuals appear throughout the source list (Kanno, Schroer, Rommel, Hitler, Khaldei, Kovalev, named Canadian gunners) in contrast to World War One's near-total anonymity — read as consistent with a manufactured moral narrative needing named heroes and villains to attach to. Two World War II tanks were also identified as accidental anachronisms within the World War One painting (previously logged); the WWII painting's colorization instances are read as the same medium-boundary leak running in the opposite temporal direction. Sourcing for both WWI and WWII paintings was fast and near-random, undertaken as a technical test rather than researched curation — a method identified this session as the mechanism that makes retrospective historical readings genuine discoveries rather than confirmations of an argument already built in.
Yevgeny Khaldei's 'Raising a Flag over the Reichstag' (2 May 1945) confirmed by the artist as the specific source for the Soviet flag atop the ruined tower — staged in deliberate imitation of Rosenthal's Iwo Jima photograph, darkroom-edited (a second looted wristwatch scratched from the negative, smoke added), flag sewn from tablecloths. Positioned directly above a photograph of Hitler and his generals viewing a tank parade (source list #19/#39) — a compositional relationship the artist describes as 'dunking on' the regime, placed through the build process and then consciously reinforced once noticed. This pairing anchors a session-long historical discussion of WWII propaganda apparatus (German Propagandakompanie, Allied Office of War Information/Why We Fight) as having actively manufactured the 'confirmed evil, defeated' narrative that WWI never received — Imperial Germany was not cast as WWI's moral equivalent of Nazi Germany in either wartime propaganda's lasting effect or postwar historical consensus.
Related Patterns
Throughlines and bio events that include this work — the same connections shown on those pages, linked back here.
- Camera-awareness chain across the triptych: World War One's raw documentary photography teaches a generation to see itse
- The trust-economy across WWI, WWII, and Vietnam: WWII's manufactured 'good vs evil' narrative (built through propaganda
- The Korea-gap: Korea (1950-53) is entirely absent from the Mediums of War project, chronologically sitting between WWII
- Anachronism leaking across the medium-per-era scaffolding: The medium-per-era logic (b&w for WWI, color for WWII, film f
- Sourcing method as the mechanism enabling genuine discovery: Both World War One and World War Two began as tests (compos
- 'World War Two' as retroactive bundling: The painting holds together three structurally distinct conflicts under one his
- The anonymous witness figure as viewer-surrogate (Dürer descendant): A bust-portrait figure, cropped at the waist, float
- Global Peace Walk 2000 as the shared root of Art Collision and Mediums of War: The Global Peace Walk 2000 (San Francisco
Vision Analysis
The sky is far denser with aircraft than World War One's — 30+ planes and formations rather than a sparse handful — with real variety in altitude and clustering: fighters and bombers group in tight mid-height formations, paratroopers drift alone as isolated dots, a few aircraft sit apart from any formation entirely. Color is present immediately (khaki, olive drab, a red star insignia, a Soviet flag planted on a ruined building), unlike World War One's black-and-white register. The horizon is not flat: it rises to a ruined tower flying the Soviet flag (the tallest point, confirmed by the artist as the Khaldei Reichstag photograph), punctuated by smokestacks, dropping toward open water on the far left where an anonymous, uncatalogued bust-portrait figure appears cropped at the waist, impossibly upright in the sea. Directly beneath the flag tower sits a photograph of Hitler and his generals reviewing a tank parade. Mid-ground carries tanks (Tiger, Panzer, desert-tan Afrika Korps vehicles) and a single black box sitting alone on pale open ground. Bottom rows are dense with infantry, POWs, and wounded, including two dark near-silhouette combat photographs, a yellow-canistered US Chemical Warfare Service smoke-bomb scene, a row of soldiers with a captured Soviet map (Finnish, Porlampi Motti, 1941) stacked above a row ending on US Marines holding a handmade thank-you sign (Guam, 1944). Photographs in this painting more often touch or overlap directly than World War One's discretely-floating images, though the artist clarified this is due to the richer color palette creating sharper paint boundaries rather than tighter physical placement.
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