The Portrait of the Fallen Soldier

Kaziah Hancock paints portraits of fallen American Soldiers and delivers them to the soldier's family for FREE. This is amazing and touching for many reasons. But here's what touched me: Her paintings are BEAUTIFUL. They are so much more than a simple "likeness." The image of the soldier is infused with her experience of him. The painting is her experience suspended in time forever, like his young life. It is a creation of a creation destroyed. There's no question that her connection with each soldier is intimate. Its MORE than a portrait because you can see through the rhythm of her brushstrokes and the character of the light that there is something of his soul being translated through her and captured on canvas. Each portrait resonates so vividly with that life, that painful singularity that exists only once in all of time in each of us. So generous and loving an expression made me feel that the price of war is so clearly and irrefutably....prohibitive.