I’ve not written seriously in years; what I guess that means is I haven’t written about things I take “seriously”. I’ve written and illustrated some books for my kids and done some cartoons for them too. But writing the kinds of essays and stories I wrote in the past stopped shortly after my second daughter was born. I have recently been motivated to think about things that I’d shelved due to a lack of time and energy. An unfinished novel that was supposed to be the big finish to the story of the characters in my books, Waiting for the Enemy, Battle Rattle, and High Desert Rats is just sitting under my desk. I frequently bump the folder the novel is stored in with my left foot while working at my computer. Yes it is just a coincidence, Hugh Martin. If I had put it into my filing cabinet then I may never have thought about it again. But I didn’t file it away, and I like to think about connections like this because they help me to maintain some hope that the world isn’t ruled by pure chaos.
In order to get back into the right head space to work on that novel, I need to reread my other books. The thought of doing so is not thrilling. I didn’t write them to read them myself, after all. But to do a good job I had to read them countless times when I was working on them. So the rereading needs to get done, and I will do it. But when I picked up Battle Rattle I realized something that I hadn’t been equipped to notice in the past. The cover is a cropped and photoshopped version of a painting done by Tom Lea.
I am a painter as well as a writer now, and because of that I spend a little time each week looking at art books to see what other artist’s have done in the past. This allows me opportunities to study the works that I really like, and to learn about artists other than the few who were discussed in my time in school. I wasn’t an art history major so I didn’t get much more than a “greatest hits” of artists; as a result, I didn’t even really think making art was something that more than about 10 people had ever done well enough for the world to remember them. I’d name them, but you already know the names because most of them are Ninja Turtles.
While at the library I grabbed a book called Art of War: Eyewitness U.S. Combat Art From the Revolution Through the Twentieth Century. This book was a random selection, but one that makes sense because I am working on a couple painting projects that deal with the military. As I read through the book, I saw a painting of a man staring into the eyes of the viewer. He wore a combat helmet, and there was a highlight that slashed across the front of the helmet from left to right at an upward angle that I recognized immediately from the cover of my own book.
This was jarring because I expected that Amazon would’ve paid someone to make a new cover for the book when they published it as a Kindle Single. I think they might have paid someone to do the cover, and I think that, maybe, the person who did it altered the image enough so that he or she believed it was different enough to be “new.” But when I saw it, and then saw that I had missed this great opportunity to learn about an artist who wrote books and painted, much like I am doing now, it made me a little disappointed.
Tom Lea died in 2001. So he was not around to be part of a discussion about the use of his painting as a book cover. I would like to think he’d be okay with it, but I’ll never know. I didn’t know him or his art prior to this discovery. But now I know his work, and I am glad that I came across it. I read a book of his The Brave Bulls. It’s a novel about bullfighting in Mexico. I thought the book was fine. It seemed to be written in a way that would look good as a movie or something. I don’t know how else to describe it. I like his paintings more than I like his writing, and that’s just fine.
What matters more to me is that Tom Lea was a writer and an artist who was capable of doing these two things that I am currently pursuing as a career, and he did them well enough to have a career and life built around making art in multiple forms.
Lea was with the with the 1st Marine Division at Peleleliu, and for anyone who has seen The Pacific or read With the Old Breed or Helmet for My Pillow, then you’ll know how deadly it was for the marines and the Japanese who fought there. Lea was there as an artist while the fighting happened. I assume, because I haven’t read anything to contradict it, that he did not storm the beach with the marines, but it was, by all accounts, an ugly and horrible place to be during the time he was there. So he wasn’t a soldier in the war, but he was an artist who was there while it was happening, and that is pretty amazing; I can’t believe they let him do it. The only thing I can think of that is similar (I’m sure there are a lot of examples of other artists doing this that I’ve not heard of) is MIchael Herr and his book Dispatches about the Vietnam War. There is something about occupying that particular space that fascinates me.
Part of me is angry that his painting was used in this way, by Amazon, to put a cover on my book, and part of me is glad because had it not been used I don’t know that I’d have been pushed to learn more about Tom Lea. I could email the artist who did the cover to see what his rationale was, or if he was told to use that image by Amazon. But I guess there is not much good that could come from that anyway. It’s not like I (or Tom Lea’s estate) are seeking some kind of monetary settlement. I just wish they’d credited him at least because then I could have looked more into Lea’s art and writing without having just stumbled upon it by coincidence when I was in my local library.
But to keep this short for the time being, I want to just end by saying that if you are at all interested in Tom Lea’s work, then just give it a quick google. He has a lot of stuff that is not war related, but that, of course, is what I am most interested in.
