Thoughts--> Richard Nickolson "How to Tell A War Story"

The Washingtonian, Richard Emery Nickolson’s lecture on “How to Tell a War Story” used both war images and stories to depict reveal the truth through war stories. He brought to this lecture not only research but also experience with war, being a Vietnam War Artists. Currently he is a professor of painting and drawing at Indiana University-Purdue University”.

He began his lecture reading a quote from Tim O’Brien, about the importance of stories. The line that stood out the most to me was that “stories are for joining the past to the future”. I found this quote to be so relevant to Nickolson’s lecture because each war that he described had a different text and images to help illustrate the truth behind the war. The texts that he chose to complement the images were from different periods than the images.

When Nickolson described the section of his talk, entitled “The Art of Combat: ‘Then and Now’”, it had an impact on me because of the way he related text and images. This section relating stories to imagery was engaging because it seemed to reveal the war stories in the most truthful, real manner. What grasped my attention when he introduced this section was how he started with a story that was personal to him, related to his experience as an artist during the Vietnam War. Describing how while being involved with the ‘U.S. Army’s Combat Artist Program’, photographers, drawers, and other artists, like Robert Knight and William Harrington, used different artistic mediums to “document military and civilian life”.

In the “The Art of Combat: ‘Then and Now’” segment of his talk it was full of elements that really grabbed my attention, but the most powerful aspect of his lecture for me was the way he depicted how Vietnam soldiers used their stories and experiences from the war as their text to create art that helped them to tell the viewer their story and ‘heal’ from the war. The artists in this section that engaged my attention the most was Sandoval. His technique and the uniqueness of his work, in which he weaves pieces of students’ trashed artwork together to create his art, was really fascinating. The way that he worked with recycled materials in this manner really interested me because in my opinion he uses creative, abstract, and personal expression to comment on events in his life or events, and war events of the pasts. As a Vietnam veteran he expressed his story about the war in his 1984 flag series entitled ‘State of the Union’. The other series of textile art that he made was his 1985 work ‘Ground Zero’. The way that he created these masterpieces in my opinion have such a profound message in relation to war and politics.

Richard Nickolson’s talk was unique, in the way that he weaved text and images together. Rather than having his images and text together or simultaneous, the words had more of an impact on me with him reading the text orally and then playing or allowing the viewer to read them also. His talk had a lot of surprises, meaning that there were many thing, images, and ways that he presented his work that I would never have imagined to do.