Marine Corps artists brave combat and harsh conditions to sketch troops in action

Over 20,000 service members from more than a dozen different nations are participating in the exercise, which is taking place throughout northern Norway, Sweden, and Finland. Troops are conducting training on land, sea, and in the air.

Over 50 submarines, frigates, corvettes, aircraft carriers, and various amphibious vessels will participate in Nordic Response.

More than 100 fighter jets, transport aircraft, and maritime surveillance aircraft — including the CH-53 Super Stallion, Merlin, Cobra, and Osprey — are also participating.

On land, troops will conduct exercises in tanks, tracked vehicles, and other vehicles and work with various artillery systems.

Combat art dates back centuries, offering a glimpse into significant moments of warfare throughout history.

Artists have documented the Marine experience since the service branch was established in 1775, but armed forces in the US didn’t have an official program until World War II.

In 1941, the US Navy established the Combat Artist Corps, and the Marine Corps followed suit in 1942 through its Department of Public Relations.

According to a call for Marines to serve in MCCAP, artists are tasked to “use creative thinking, design, and drawing skills to visually document Marine Corps personnel and activities across the globe,” including training exercises and overseas operations.

Combat art created in the program is featured in the Art Collection of the National Museum of the Marine Corps “to preserve for posterity the actions and events that made history.”

Officers and enlisted Marines of any rank with artistic abilities are eligible for the program. Participants also could be asked to “serve on temporary additional duty and work in challenging environments in order to realize the vision and mission of MCCAP,” like enduring the hard conditions of Nordic Defender.

Participants in the MCCAC program were “Marines first, and artists, or anything else, second,” Brig. Gen. Robert L. Denig, then serving as the Marine Corps’ first director of public information, wrote in 1943.

Because combat artists are “Marines first,” they draw on their own understanding of the realities of the service to accurately capture the experience of a Marine.

Denig wrote in 1943 that Marine combat artists were tasked to “record with the artist’s eye the great and simple doings of men at war, to picture its action, its settings, its tragedy, its humor.”

Denig’s simple guidance to combat artists was “go to war, do art.”

US Marine Corps Maj. Michael Reynolds is one such Marine. He’s been tasked with capturing experiences during Nordic Response through coal, ink, graphite, and wax.

“What we do captures emotion, spirit, and stories of individual people,” Reynolds said. “So I think that’s part of what it takes to be a combat artist. It’s someone who observes their environment around them in a way that not everybody does.”

By accompanying the Marines and allied troops in the exercises through heaps of snow, rugged terrain, and frigid temperatures, the combat artists channel their observations into their art, conveying more nuanced details than what a camera lens can capture.

“A camera is a very mechanical way of observing the environment,” Reynolds said. “It’s fantastic for evidentiary processing, but it doesn’t always convey the same emotion that the human camera can, as an artist does.”

Richard Johnson, another combat artist also illustrating Nordic Response, echoed the differences in the two mediums while commending the work that both photographers and artists alike do to give people an inside look at warfighters at work.

“I’ve known photographers who are unbelievably brave individuals who have captured unbelievable images,” Johnson said, recalling his time documenting the Marines in the lead-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom.

“It’s a mechanical lens versus a human lens,” Johnson continued. “A camera has that lens distortion that is not likely to really keep what you look like. An artist can give that real view of the world.”

A longtime member of the Marine Corps Combat Art Program, Johnson said the difference between photos and art that strikes him the most is that “you really connect with people on a visceral level, perhaps differently than photographs do.”

“When I first returned from Iraq, I arrived to a stack of mail on my desk,” Johnson said. “In the newspaper world, when someone writes a letter, you’ve really pissed someone off, so when I got back, I thought, ‘Wow, I really pissed someone off.'”

“But a lot of the mail was positive, and a lot of them really attached themselves to the art and the story of soldiers far from home,” he said.

“It was such a shock to get that kind of response, and it’s continued, especially with the portraits,” Johnson explained. “There is something about human nature and the construction of the material that relates to humanity, and it translates to other people as well, so the viewers also get some of that same emotion coming through the art.”