Dulce et Decorum est Pro Patria Mori

Having worked from crime scene photos and police records briefly to create images comparing the brutal and the brutalised, it was a small step to start working with medical files. I chose to use images from the Gillies Archive at Queen Mary's Hospital, Sidcup, London. The images come from Sir Harold Gillies' pioneering work reconstructing the faces of soldiers from the First World War. This was uncharted medical territory, and many of the soldiers, already having suffered tremendous injuries fighting in Europe were subjected to further agonising treatment as a result of the experimental medical techniques being used.

In the same way that I was interested in the different reactions of people towards the victims of murderers I wanted to gauge how people felt about the unpleasant looking faces of these soldiers. I actually watched a documentary around this time about how the brain is wired to reject the deformed.

I painted this guy in under 2 hours. I remember having to rush it out in order to meet a friend at the pub for a session of Classical Chinese revision. The unfortunate airman crashed his maiden flight and was engulfed in burning kerosene. He didn't die until after Gillies attempted to graft skin from his chest to his face after excising the burnt tissue. I find something hopelessly tragic about stories like this. I didn't want to be too melancholy though, so instead tried to emphasise the kind of stoic dignity that these men seemed (to me-abstracted through 80 year old documents) to possess.

I blew up the canvases, these two are about 180cm tall, which gave me a chance to use bigger brushes and be more expressive in the way I pushed the paint around the canvas. I think they worked ok.