Texas Fallen Soldiers Project makes paintings for families
Posted On: Tuesday, Sep. 30 2008 05:29 AM
By Sheena Williams
Killeen Daily HeraldTEMPLE – "Let's get this guy home," whispered artist Phil Taylor as he toted his latest portrait to the home of Shea Warford on Monday.
Warford watched in silence as Taylor carefully opened the box in her living room and pulled out the painting of her husband, Cpl. William Warford, who was killed Sept. 5, 2007, while deployed in Iraq.
In that hushed moment, Taylor quietly explained that the piece had taken him more than 50 hours to paint. And Jere Beal, William's mother, smiled as tears filled her eyes as she shared that Taylor had portrayed her son's crystal blue eyes and freckles perfectly.
"I had to make sure I got his chin," Taylor said while wiping away his tears. "I had to make sure I got his chin just right. And he had that scar on his eyebrow."
"Yeah, that's when he decided to fall off the porch on his tricycle when he was 4 years old," Beal said, laughing while tears rolled down her cheeks.
Taylor explained that the process of instilling William's spirit and personality into the portrait hadn't been easy and that he had many "long chats" with the painting.
"Some were good and some were bad," said Taylor, but he added that he was very pleased with the final depiction of the fallen hero.
"He and I had some tough moments together. Some of the guys flow more easily and some of them don't," Taylor said. "There are certain features that have to be captured in order for the family to know that it's him – like the scar in his eyebrow, the freckles in the right place and his chin. All those little details have to be captured because when I leave, the family is still going to be looking at it and they want to see all of that."
A tattooed 1st Cavalry Division patch with her husband's name wrapped around it peeked out from under theleft sleeve of Shea's T-shirt as she explained that this isn't the only portrait she owns of her husband. This will be her third and it will be placed in her living room to help her keep the memory of her husband alive.
"I'm like, obsessed," Shea said with a smile. "There are different ways people handle things like this. There are people who don't want anything, then there are people who want everything. I still have all of his clothes hanging up in our closet. So maybe that's weird but everyone's different. It's just how you deal with stuff. But it helps me feel closer to him."
For more information on Phil Taylor's Texas Fallen Soldiers program, go to
www.texasfallensoldiers.com.
Contact Sheena Williams at
sheenaw@kdhnews.com or (254) 501-7553.