I’ve been painting images of child soldiers from around the world. It isn’t a new fascination, I’ve been reading about Johnny Htoo and Luther Htoo for years. They are twin brothers who jointly led the God's Army guerrilla group, a splinter group of the Karen National Union, in Myanmar back in the late 90’s. I could swear Rirkrit Tiravanija drew pictures of them but I can’t substantiate that claim.
Anyway, child soldiers have been on my mind lately as I am reading about the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Drawing from photos — whatever, that’s another argument. Let me start over. When I paint with watercolors, I usually don’t sketch things out ahead of time. It leads to lots of distortions so the source material becomes mushy. Below are example of a sketched image and a painted one. Something about sketching creates a shorthand for me and I work in a different style. I guess it's like penmanship. Writing in cursive changes the content of what you write just like typing this out yields different results than writing it out by hand.
