Bill Donovan

From May 2004 to May 2005 I made drawings in Afghanistan. I was there
as a soldier, but kept making drawings anyways. In a recent conversation
with Michael Anderson he pointed out that a lot of guys go there as
photo-journalists or as even as artists, like Steve Mumford, but I was in
the unique position of carrying both a gun and a pencil.

Here are some of the drawings on loose leaf paper:

Eleven notebooks were filled with drawings and notes, about one per
month during the year long deployment. All the notebooks are the same:
Moleskin Pocket Squared Notebooks, which are 3.5 x 5.5" and have 192
pages. They had a tough cover and a band to keep them closed, which
was important because I would keep them in my front right pants pocket of
the Desert Combat Uniform, allowing me to bring them everywhere. They
soaked up a lot of dust and sweat, which is why some pages are yellowing.

Tallying over 2,000 pages the project was enormous. Brevity is the soul of
wit, so I'll give you ten good ones in chronological order.

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art

There are two bodies of work, one on loose leaf paper, and one in notebooks.