I have been obsessively researching the U.S. Civil War. As a youngster... I knew there was a lot of information to sort through and that a lot of people died, that was about it... I shied away from giving it a fair look. when I went to college in Savannah, GA and ended up staying for five years. I heard more about the civil war in that time than I had in my first twenty years in Massachusetts. Since then I have followed a natural progression that has led me to want to know more. On a recent ride up from Shannon's parents house in Newborn, GA, we stopped at Gettysburg National Park... I had always wanted to see the Gettysburg Cyclorama (a 356' long 48' tall 360 degree painting) since I first learned of its existence, and I wanted to see the battlefield. The painting was great, everything I thought it would be, but actually being on the field, at places such as "Devil's Den" and following my audio tour CD really activated my imagination. When I got home a little over a month ago I began to pour over every source of information I could.
Colonel Robert Gould Shaw leads the 54th Massachusetts during a frontal assault on Ft. Wagner, S.C.
not far at all from where I went to college 142 years later.
I worked as a pedicab driver in Savannah and occasionally would get a passenger from Boston, they would say to show them something special, something different. I would always take them to the Confederate monument in the middle of Forsyth Park. I think now it is embarrassing to admit, but when I first went to college, that statue might as well have been a Nazi monument for WWII... thinking here is a monument to "the bad guys", the people, we as Americans, should not honor.
The monument is immaculate, and has an inscription that reads "Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon the slain that they may live." A melancholic gesture indeed... aside from this, you get a sense from stories or songs from the point of view of the South, that the Civil War resulted in a terrible and cruel loss... for example, listen to "The Night they drove Old Dixie Down" by The Band with the heart breaking vocals by the late Levon Helm. This feeling of having lost (commonly referred to as "The Lost Cause") is something I have found to be vitally important to understanding American politics since the Civil War and also profoundly absent from how I learned about the conflict in school in the north.
The Confederate Monument, Savannah, GA
The issue I am dealing with now is, how, if at all, do I relate my artistic endeavors to all of the information I am taking in... It is just too much... between abolitionists, the major battles in the eastern and western theaters, the now mythologized generals, the tactics and weapons used in battle, and the scale and violence of it all. Its too much... definitely too much to try to say it all at once.
John Brown
The horrific and costly battle of Fredricksburg
I had wanted to perhaps recreate an image of a battle, much like I had recreated pages of illuminated manuscripts a few months ago. From what I have read about the scale of some of these battles, this image of The Battle of Mission Ridge is the only painting I found on the internet, (in my opinion, including the monumental Gettysburg Cyclorama) that attempts to depict the actual scale of a large Civil War battle.
Most of the illustrations you see of the well known battles, such as the image of Chickamauga below are awkward and make the scale appear to be of a few hundred men pitted against another few hundred... Quite Frankly, they are way off... I do not want to use them as potential references for new work because I feel that they hardly do the actual event any justice. For example, Pickett's charge was a single assault of approximately 12,500 men. If you watch the film Gettysburg, it looks more like a charge of 1,250 men. I don't even know if recreating one of these old paintings is something I want to do... or making a painting of a battle for that matter... whatever happens, this is what I have been doing lately, and where I have been mentally, I think the work will start to fill in soon.
xoxo
Confederate Cavalry General J.E.B. Stuart
Confederate General "Stonewall" Jackson
Winfield Scott Hancock and his boyz
Nathaniel "Shanks" Evans
Some Union men with a fresh cannon
Some of John Hunt Morgan's captured men