He’s a self-taught artist, so skilled a draftsman that he can still replicate the diagram of the engine room of the vessel where he served. Smith comes from a long line of veterans and served in the Navy himself as a boiler room technician on an amphibious assault ship from 1981 to 1984. Over the past 15 years, Smith has dedicated himself to creating some of the world’s most intricate and evocative renderings of warships that fought in the Pacific theater in World War II. “When I feel I’ve captured the ship and its essence … enough for the crew of that ship to say, ‘OK, this representation is our ship,’ that’s when I get the tears,” he says. When JD Smith finished his drawing of the Indianapolis, in 2019, he took a drive past a burial ground for veterans in Los Angeles and wept thinking about those who had died on the ship. For more than three days, sailors battled shark attacks, dehydration and salt poisoning. A few minutes past midnight on July 30, 1945, two Japanese torpedoes struck the 10,000-ton USS Indianapolis.
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