Art Friday : John Wallin Liberto’s WWII Military Aviation Art

Friday, September 19th, 2008, 12:00 amRoys

This post has been lying in the Drafts section for close to a year now while awaiting permission from the artist, Mr John Wallin Liberto, to use his artwork. Seems a bit wasteful to leave a complete post lying in the drafts, so here it is

Discovered John’s work from the October 2007 Lite issue of the digital-only 2DArtist magazine where his stunning artwork of a P-51D Mustang in pursuit of a Focke Wulf Fw 190 was published on Page 7 (below).

While John is probably better known for his concept work on games like Gears of War and Battlefield 2142, what really interests me at his official site is the collection of his richly detailed and realistic military aviation art.

I appreciate highly detailed miltary aviation art featuring historically accurate markings and insignia as these symbols and serials on each aircraft are the key to a wealth of interesting information about that particular aircraft, its pilot and the corresponding squadron’s rich combat history.

Take for example, the artwork titled Sturmgruppe Dahl.

On the surface, it simply is an illustration of four Focke Wulf Fw190s in flight. Upon googling “Sturmgruppe Dahl”, I realized that these aircraft belonged to the Strurmgruppen (obviously), an elite cadre of volunteer pilots trained to close in and attack massive swarms of Allied bombers at extremely short range (~300m) or even ram the bombers in uparmoured and upgunned Fw 190s.

The rightmost Fw 190A-8 ‘Blue 13′ was the mount of Major Walther Dahl, Kommodore of JG300. The red fuselage band on the aircraft is known as a Reichsverteidigung and denotes that this aircraft was employed in the Defence of the Reich role.

Another painting of a Sturmgruppen aircraft that I like a lot is the Fw 190A-7 ‘White 14′ of Sturmstaffel 1 (above). View the cowling emblem in greater detail at Feldpost Amerika.

Other historical aircraft of note are Fw 190A-8 ‘Black 8′ of IV.(Sturm)/JG3 (above) and Spitfire Mk IXc (MK432/OU-U ‘Baby Bea V’) (below) of 485 Squadron, RNZAF, the first New Zealand squadron formed in the UK during WWII.

Last but not least, is the painting that attracted me to his work in the first place. Googling the “Big Beautiful Doll” and its serial “WS-I” reveals information about its pilot, Col. John D. Landers who first served in the Pacific Theatre in the 49th Fighter Group before becoming CO of the 78th Fighter Group in 1945. The Google search also throws up several post-war civilian aircraft including a Canadian Aircraft CA-18 (G-HAEC) painted to resemble this fabulously colourful aircraft as well as several artworks (down!) by other artists of ‘Big Beautiful Doll’.

Visit John Wallin Liberto’s official site for more exciting artwork.

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