Corrosion

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Recommended: War between Vietnam and us

Corrosion is defined as a slow deterioration by being eaten or worn away; this can pertain to the mental corrosion of the mind state as a result of war. What will be seen or done in the war has crippling ramifications as more soldiers are surfacing with the fractured mental state. Rat Kiley experienced the dismantling of his mind. As a medic, he has seen the horrors of the Vietnam War, yet the death and medical procedures slowly weighed on him physically and mentally. To the point of a schizophrenic hysteria which was his demise. During the Vietnam War Kiley had lost a way to cope with his surroundings. The loss of his brothers and the unrelenting blows of war ultimately shattered his mind leaving him as a hollow shell of the man he use to be. “Corrosion” a painting by Sara Kerr, represents a drastic transformation of Rat Kiley’s mental state as a result of being exposed to the Vietnam War.
To begin, incorporating a cracked helmet as a symbol of the rupture of Rat Kiley’s mental state that occurred in the war. [In the center of the canvas there is a helmet with a gaping hole with cracks throughout the headgear. In the composition the crack trails through and dividing the painting. Within the center there a band in-between the crack that reads, “Corrosion”.] For this reason, in the painting the cracks are to represent a broken mind into two parts. The gap serves as a chipped away source of dealing with war. Dividing into the paranoid thoughts in result of the war after effect while the title “Corrosion” incorporated into the helmet symbolizes the paranoid thoughts that chipped away at his psyche. Every crack is what turned Kiley into a sweet, humorous, good intentioned boy to an introvert riddled with disturbed views and though...

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...k its toll. In a way both men died that day only Kiley’s destruction was a silent form of a death inflicted upon him.
Sara Kerr’s captivating mixed-media painting “Corrosion” features the converting of psyches in Rat Kiley from being in the Vietnam War. Undergoing from an imaginative storyteller, with his upbeat humor and being a strong medic that aided his fellow comrades, to become a man that was struggling mentally in the grip of the Vietnam War. The experience of the war ultimately broke Rat Kiley. The work of art is a message of a man that would be poisoned by his surroundings the corrosion was a festering wound that could not be healed. The aspect of how war can demolish the very fabric of a human being. The moral of the painting is how soldiers exposed to war are forever tainted souls.

Works Cited

Kerr, Sara. "Corrosion". May.2014. Mixed-media painting.

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