Mike is sitting beside the water in Phan Thiết, Vietnam. He is about twenty-five. Shirtless. One dog tag around his neck. One knee pulled toward him. Behind him, a pier stretches across the water.
He had been working nights. He remembers being allowed down to the water that day, with a guard nearby.
More than fifty years later, I know the man in this painting intimately.
But I never knew this version of him.
I was still a child when Mike was in Vietnam. By the time our lives found one another, this young man existed mostly in photographs and stories—in memories carried by Mike and by the people who had been there with him.
Painting Elsewhere became a way of spending some time with him.
The geometry came slowly. I wasn't interested in recreating the photograph exactly. I wanted the painting to feel the way memory does: fragmented, softened by time, some things vivid and others nearly disappearing.
What surprised me most was how ordinary the original moment was.
There is no battle here. No uniform. No ceremony.
Just a young man beside the water, somewhere very far from home.
Perhaps that's why I couldn't stop looking at him.
The Story Behind the Painting
Elsewhere is part of an unfolding group of paintings drawn from photographs of Mike and the people he knew during his service in Vietnam.
The next painting began with another ordinary morning—and Mike's best friend, Ron.
