Rick Yarosh, 27, has two holes where his nose used to be, and the raw-looking skin of his disfigured face looks melted and fused. The former Iraq War soldier fell victim to a homemade bomb in Iraq, which left burns over 60 percent of his body and rendered his face unrecognizable from how he had looked before his injuries.
But he proudly displays those wounds in a portrait on display at a new exhibition at Washington’s National Portrait Gallery.
The former army sergeant said he has come to terms with his radically altered appearance, and is not at all put off that his scarred visage will be seen by potentially thousands of people.
“I’m not worried about people seeing me. If you want to be accepted you have to be proud of yourself. I’m not going to hide that, that’s what I am for the rest of my life,” he said.
In the picture, Yarosh, wearing a gray army tee shirt, looks directly at the viewer with an intense, even defiant glare.
The canvas, by painter Matthew Mitchell, is one of 49 works that are part of a portrait competition at the museum.
“When I met Rick, I was shocked when I first saw him,” said Mitchell, who hails from Amherst, Massachusetts. “But then I sat with him for a while and immediately, I look you know, the shape of his face is unusual, the shape of all his features is unusual, but there is a lot of beauty that you can see there.”
He said that while hard to look at, his work Portrait 23, Rick Yarosh is also, in its way, riveting.
“Even the colors of the skin are beautiful. Unusual but, beautiful,” Mitchell said.
In painting the arresting portrait of the veteran soldier, Mitchell said he hoped to convey — and to discover — “what happens in America with the war, a human landscape of the war.”
“I tried to catch the human dignity,” he said.
The National Portrait Gallery has as its mission to tell the stories of the US through the artistic representations of people — mostly famous, but some ordinary citizens — who have shaped US society.
For the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, for which the portrait of Yarosh was a submission, the museum invited artists all over the country to create portraits, from which they would choose the most iconic.
The National Portrait Gallery asked the artists to submit likenesses of people close to them, and then sifted through more than 3,300 entries that poured in from all 50 US states.
The works, including paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, videos and new media, display single figures, groups, or self-portraits — some done in a classical drawing style, while others are more abstract.
The grand prize winner of the award — named after former donor and museum volunteer Virginia Outwin Boochever, who died in 2005 — received a US$25,000 award and a commission to create a portrait of a notable living American for the Portrait Gallery’s permanent collection.
While his portrait did not win the grand prize, Yarosh said looking at the picture reminds him of his accomplishment as a soldier.
“The first thing that I see when I see that picture is someone who is proud, so much pride in that face, and I hope that’s what people see,” he said. “If you can’t be proud of yourself you can’t do what you want to do, you can’t achieve the goals that you want, and that’s why I’m so proud of who I am, so proud of what I have done.”
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