Work
EVADE
An A-10 Warthog deploys flares against unseen threats, viewed from below and behind, the aircraft banking through deep atmospheric charcoal. The flare trails streak diagonally across the composition as the only source of light. Built as the definitive close air support weapon and celebrated as nearly indestructible, the A-10 is here rendered vulnerable; the hunter become the hunted, US air superiority questioned by the reality of its deployment over adversaries it was never designed to fear. The stereotype of military dominance, suspended in a moment of defensive urgency.
Angel
A C-130 Hercules approaches head-on, its four engine wingspan bisecting the composition. The aircraft is deploying decoy flares whose smoke, caught in the wingtip vortices, billows outward from each wingtip, forming the shape of a second, enormous pair of wings. A mechanical act of self-defense becomes, unintentionally, an image of transformation: a military transport rendered angelic by fire and turbulence. Flare smoke and atmospheric cloud merge into a single continuous substance. The title names what the aircraft briefly becomes: not through intent but through the accidental poetry of countermeasures meeting wind.
HINDsight
A Mi-24 Hind, Soviet in design, Czech in donation, Ukrainian in current service, sits on the ground at night, cockpit door open, two crew members tending to it. Rendered as seen through a white phosphor PVS-14 night vision device: carbon charcoal on blue paper replicating the cool blue-white of modern NVG optics. The ground level vantage makes the machine intimate rather than monumental. The title carries a double meaning: the Hind is the aircraft's NATO reporting name; hindsight speaks to what we understand only after the fact: about wars, weapons, and the long afterlives of machines.
SOAR
An MH-60M Black Hawk, operated exclusively by the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, the Night Stalkers, is reduced to silhouette: a dark void dissolving into deep charcoal. Below, ground facilities appear as long exposure light trails, ghostly smears of motion against the dark. The world below burns with light; the helicopter above is pure absence. The title holds a double meaning: SOAR as the human dream of flight, and SOAR as the unit designation of the Night Stalkers, who operate precisely in this darkness, unseen. The composition formally enacts what they do.
Exfil
A panoramic composition: an AH-6 Little Bird helicopter hugs a rugged ridgeline while three human figures stand silhouetted in the lower right foreground. It is the only piece in the series where the aircraft is diminished by its landscape, dwarfed by the scale of the terrain and the vastness of the sky above. The human figures anchor the composition in what flight is ultimately for: the people on the ground, waiting. Exfil, military shorthand for extraction, holds both urgency and stillness.
HEAVY
Two C-5 Galaxy strategic airlifters, among the largest aircraft ever built, rendered as almost pure silhouettes against total black. Three vapor trails descend in brilliant white, the only luminosity in the piece. Stripped of markings, national identity, and mission, these colossal machines are reduced to glowing geometry. The darkness absorbs their implied scale entirely. The title, HEAVY, military callsign for large aircraft, carries its second meaning quietly: the weight of machines whose size exists in service of purposes that exceed any single flight.
GOTHIC
A formation of Black Hawks and Little Birds moves low over Mogadishu, the city below consumed by smoke and ruin. The aircraft occupy the middle distance, neither dominant nor diminished, suspended between the chaos of the ground and the indifferent sky above. Charcoal atmosphere and architectural rubble merge into a single continuous texture, the boundary between air and city dissolved. The title names the operation: Gothic Serpent, October 1993, eighteen Americans killed, the longest sustained firefight involving US forces since Vietnam. The drawing does not depict heroism or failure. It depicts the moment of being there, inside the smoke, the outcome not yet written.