Tuesday, August 30, 2016

artist Elizabeth Black delayed a promising career to volunteer as a Red Cross girl, and while in a RC Clubmobile, sketched US military through Europe, sending those to their families



Above is the advertisement for it, so you can see if you'll be interested enough to watch the 30 minute documentary, below


Finding Elizabeth's Soldiers from Pierina Morelli on Vimeo.

or a full hour biography that goes more in depth on her life before the WW2 Red Cross volunteer work she did



Leaving a promising art career behind, Pittsburgh native Elizabeth Black volunteered with the American Red Cross during World War II. During this time, she sketched more than 1,000 portraits of soldiers, sailors, and airmen in England, France, Luxemburg, Holland, Germany, and Belgium. Miss Black sketched her way across Europe, completing as many as a dozen portraits a day. Every soldier signed their sketches, often including endearments to loved ones back home.

In 2010, John Black received an unexpected surprise: a trunk, which had been stored for decades in a family member’s garage in California. Inside they found his mother’s footlocker filled with a 100 images of her sketches, photographs, and scrapbooks.

He then worked with WQED to create a documentary and locate the families of the soldiers, whose lives Elizabeth Black touched.

The documentary explores Miss Black’s lost art career, features interviews with elderly veterans who encountered the artist on the battlefield, and captures memorable scenes of amazed and appreciative families finally receiving portraits that never arrived. Through social media, a separate interactive component of the project, Finding Elizabeth’s Soldiers is working to make sure the 100 portraits in the Black collection reach the families that might not have them.

http://wqed.org/ww2portraits/content/portraits-home-front to see if you can help identify any of the sketched military


just the 1st of 9 pages of her sketches and you can see by the green word "Found" how successful this has been in reuniting the art with the soldier or family of the soldier.

http://www.wkno.org/tvshows/elizabeth_black.html
http://triblive.com/lifestyles/history/4982822-74/black-says-elizabeth

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