Bethesda, Md.


ONE day late last month, a group of artists from the Society of Illustrators in New York assembled at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center here. Armed with pads, pencils and cameras, they had two hours to carry out their mission: making drawings of service members wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. A naval petty officer shuttled them through the wards to patients who’d agreed to participate. And before long, two of the artists — Victor Juhasz, known for his satirical drawings in Rolling Stone, and Jeff Fisher, an illustrator from Long Island — found themselves in a room with Alejandro Jauregui, 27, an Army staff sergeant who barely three weeks earlier had lost both legs to a makeshift bomb in Afghanistan.


Sergeant Jauregui, restless on the bed, was surrounded by his family: his wife, five months pregnant, sat in an armchair, while their two sons bounced around the room. Mr. Juhasz and Mr. Fisher quickly got to work — not just on making drawings, but on that all-important aspect of portraiture, putting the subject at ease. Mr. Juhasz peppered the staff sergeant with questions about his experiences in the hospital, and chatted about his own son, serving in the Marine Corps, while Mr. Fisher focused on the children.


Then Mr. Juhasz asked, “Do you remember how it happened?” and the mood changed.


“Yes, I remember exactly,” said Sergeant Jauregui. And he opened up, talking about the hours before the explosion, when he’d led the bomb squad to three other explosive devices, all defused; and the frantic moments afterward, when he’d begged his platoon sergeant to admit how many limbs he’d lost. (“It’s both legs, bud,” came the reluctant reply.) As he spoke, he struggled to sit taller, cradling what remained of his left leg in his arms — body language that Mr. Juhasz captured in a diptych-like drawing that shows the man on one side, looking intently at the viewer, and his sons on the other, separated by the bed railing and a jumble of medical equipment.


The artists were at Walter Reed representing the Joe Bonham Project, a year-and-a-half-old group dedicated to documenting the experiences of wounded service members. The group — named for the limbless, faceless protagonist of “Johnny Got His Gun,” Dalton Trumbo’s 1939 antiwar novel— was founded by Michael D. Fay, a former Marine Corps combat artist, but most of its participants are civilians, working in forms that range from John Singer Sargent-style realist portraits to caricatures and graphic novels. They have already produced scores of drawings and paintings, many of which will be shown in November at the Pepco Edison Place Art Gallery in Washington.


A selection is already on display at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. There have been smaller exhibitions elsewhere, too, most notably a show last summer at Storefront, a gallery in Bushwick, Brooklyn. And the Smithsonian has lately expressed interest in collecting the work.


Brandon Fortune, the chief curator of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, credits the group with “creating a new form” by “bridging the world of combat illustration and fine art portraiture” in a way that might not have been possible in the past.


“Portraiture is no longer the elite art form that it was in previous centuries,” said Ms. Fortune, who got to know the work when Mr. Fay and some of the other artists visited her office last year. These days, she added, the genre is “a way of exploring identity, and even group identity,” in which “the subject is absolutely an agent in the creation of the portrait.”


Deborah Brown, an owner of the Storefront gallery (now called Storefront Bushwick), sees the portraits as part of a tradition, running back to artists like Goya and George Grosz, that presents uncomfortable truths about war. The gallery tried to present “an authentic, unmediated experience of this work,” she said, letting the visitors decide “whether they thought it was art or illustration, an endorsement of our military activity or a critique.” Mr. Fay said he began developing the idea for the project just before his retirement in 2009, when he realized how isolated most civilians — not to mention the art world — remained from the war. After thinking about conflicts of the past, when artists like Sargent and Winslow Homer captured scenes at field hospitals, he decided that he “wanted to get the culture more involved.”


He soon joined forces with Mr. Juhasz, who saw the project as a perfect fit for the Society of Illustrators, whose members have been the backbone of the United States Air Force Art Program since it began. The society now sends five artists a month to Walter Reed, which merged last fall with the National Naval Medical Center. Ray Alma, 47, a cartoonist for Mad Magazine, said he was motivated by the sense of helplessness he experienced after Sept. 11. “I felt so useless,” he said. “But drawing is something I can do.”


Mr. Fisher, 56, has had a son in the service, and Mr. Juhasz, 58, still does.


Jess Ruliffson, 26, who is using her sketches and interviews to create a graphic novel, appreciated the chance to address the war directly in her work “without having to go overseas.”


And for Fred Harper, 46, who draws editorial caricatures for The Week and The New York Observer, the project has provided an opportunity to hone his life-drawing skills while supporting the troops. “Even if I don’t believe in the war or why we’re there,” he said, “I still want to know about these people who are going to war.”