This painting presents a boy in battle, holding a smoking grenade, grinning with savage joy.
He doesn’t expect to live more than a few seconds. He doesn’t care. He’s totally committed to this moment, the climax of his life — totally free of uncertainty or ambiguity or doubt. This is it.
It’s a horrifying picture, combining the carefree happiness of a child, with total violence and death. There’s no escape. And there’s no fear in it at all.
In fact, this painting started with the smile of a child, a photograph of a laughing boy. Then artists were assigned to make their own variations on it.
Most of the resulting paintings were changes in the boy’s age, or hair style; some were distorted or surrealistic, some were abstractions in color or form.
Only this painter decided to use the smiling boy to create a completely different, and much darker feeling, facing the finality that happens to us.
I’ve never been in war, nor have I ever faced death at close hand. I’ve never experienced a situation like this, the ultimate “This is It” — or anything close to it.
But I have seen an authentic record of something like that from real life, something like the state of mind that this artist has captured here.
Years ago, I was researching WWII combat films for a documentary. This was original combat footage, unedited, just as it came out of the camera.
There was a roll of navy film, a little more than a minute long, a close shot of an American boy about 18, on a destroyer’s deck. Japanese suicide pilots were furiously diving at him. He was firing back at them the whole time, behind a huge grey 40mm automatic cannon. He could have been killed at any second. Maybe he was.
But he didn’t show that he was afraid, or grim. He was almost laughing. He had exactly the same look on his face that you see here on this boy in the painting.
Childish joy in the face of violent death–it actually happens.
But it’s the kind of joy that most of us would prefer to experience as kids playing cowboys with toy guns. Otherwise, it’s a joy we can do without.
Before this silent film ran out, I could see the happy boy yelling out over his gun. It was, perhaps, a final challenge to the deadly planes attacking him: Come at me, bro!
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Author’s email: john.stevenson299@gmail.com
