New Haven Independent

Toy soldiers are ominous in miniature. My own childhood obsession with them led me to fill a large wicker basket with warriors in multiple poses along with Revell models of World War II machinery, all easily transportable to the battlefield of the vacant lot next door where I imagine that, even today, a missing plastic corpse or two is still interred.

It was an inventive reversal at a January 2007 anti-war demonstration in Washington to encounter an arts collective called Mouths Wide Open distributing sandwich bags full of these toys, each with a sticker attached reading “Bring Me Home.” They were meant to be scattered as small reminders of what was even then a nearly invisible conflict

It was later that same year that I first encountered Mark Williams’ paintings of demilitarized toy soldiers overwhelmed by elephants and puppies, ducks and bears, like the record of some enlightened child’s conversion of an assassin to a plaything. Don’t we need a monument for our time? My initial thought was that Williams could create a single large scale piece to stand 20 feet high on the Pentagon lawn, but this smaller version might well be duplicated for every front yard in the country.

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