That’s what I read when I learned this morning that the United States Marine Corps has an artist in its ranks, a painter deployed to capture combat scenes.  “We have somebody who was there who can tell the story,” according to Col. Robert Oltman, USMC, referring to Sgt. Kristopher J. Battles, the lone remaining Marine combat artist.

Why not photography?  I’ll let the New York Times answer that one.

“If you and I are in the same firefight, what you see and what I see are two different things, based on our own background and experience,” said Lt. Gen. Ron Christmas, retired, the president and chief executive of the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation. “When a photograph is taken of a battle or any type of scene in combat, you see the image. But what the artist does is he takes that image and interprets it.”

And, of course, capturing a moment in a painting also serves one of art’s most ancient purposes. “It’s the pact we make with the warrior: You will live forever and we will remember you,” Ms. [Anita] Blair [, chief strategist at the National Security Professional Development Integration Office and a former acting assistant secretary of the Navy]. “And to me the best way to do that is through art. We can’t give him his life, but we can give him that immortality.”

In other words, there’s an artist, gemba, sketchpad in hand, genchi genbutsu. Faithful, always.

“It’s very hard to learn about materials academically, by reading about them or watching videos about them; the only way you truly understand a material is by making things with it,” Ive explains, going on to add that years upon years of making his own models with his own hands is what gave him a deep understanding of the materials he’s worked. “And it’s important to develop that appetite to want to make something, to be inquisitive about the material world, to want to truly understand a material on that level.”

I couldn’t help but think of the Roycrofters.  These American arts-and-crafters espoused the same kind of creative process over a century ago.  The furniture, books and other everyday objects they designed, built and fabricated expressed the exact nature of the materials used.

Ive, Apple and the Roycrofters understood.  They found the true nature of the materials in their products.  They knew that for the user to be the most pleased required total honesty and that this required gemba.