Students Paint Portraits of Fallen Soldiers

Nov. 27, 2004 — -- Face after face after face, an art exhibit in northern California honors America's fallen soldiers in Iraq -- more than 1,200 and counting.

Chester Arnold, a professor at the College of Marin, suggested the project to his art classes after seeing a photo spread in The New York Times of the faces of soldiers who had died in Iraq.

"When we were face to face with those pictures," Arnold said, "we were all having emotions that were something that we had never experienced before, sometimes ever, in our lives."

'Snuffed Out at So Early an Age'

More than 400 students and faculty volunteered to paint portraits of every single fallen soldier, and they worked up until the last minute last week finishing the portraits and mounting the exhibit.

"It doesn't matter which one I'm doing," said Chickoo Batra, one of the artists. "Each time I sort of get a frog in my throat.

"It's lives, or this particular life, snuffed out at so early an age," Batra added.

The tiny photos in the newspaper were transformed into personal portraits -- very personal.

"I bonded with their family," said Caroline Fromm-Lurie, another artist. "They've lost their child. I have four children so I cannot imagine how that would be."

The paintings are as individual as those they honor.

"She went in the service to support her child, and the child was 6 years old," one of the artists said of his subject.

'So … Young and Perfect'

They are chiseled and childlike, smiling and serious. Arnold says the overall impact is meant to be personal, not political, and, "to be more sensitive to the meaning of loss and to encounter death in a way that is respectful and communal."

Some of the families of the dead soldiers have asked that the exhibit be put on the Internet so they can see what the artists have done.

"This young man, he is so handsome and alive looking, and young and perfect," Fromm-Lurie said of one of the portrait subjects, "and it is inconceivable to me that he is dead."

As long as the dying continues, so will the painting -- face after face after face.

ABC News' Judy Muller in Los Angeles originally reported this story for World News Tonight on Nov. 21.