A few days ago I was dodging raindrops after grabbing a cup of coffee at Cafe Grumpy in Chelsea. I was wet, caffeinated, and in a hurry to get to my office. As I blew past the storefront windows of the Lyons Wier Ortt Gallery on the corner of Seventh Avenue and 20^th Street, I stopped. And then I doubled back and stared. I saw pictures of young soldiers, sailors, and Marines grinning, kicking back, and bugging out for whoever captured the snapshot-like pictures that hung on the gallery walls. I saw a lightness in the faces; a playfulness in some, cockiness in others.

Left: Division, 2008. Right: Replay, 2008. Copyright Mary Henderson, courtesy of Lyons Wier Ortt Gallery.

A Marine in woodland camouflage sacks out on the ground cradling his M-16; the arms, legs, and half a mouth of another man spill out of the edges of the scene. Two Army staff sergeants in mirror shades pose in another painting. One smiles formally; the other wears a serious game face, a cigarillo lodged in the corner of his mouth. A half-smiling soldier behind them looks down, as if caught unaware at the moment the imaginary shutter was tripped.

They didn't look hard or damaged, which is how so many of the 20-something service members I know now look after two, three, and four deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. The pictures had an innocence-unlost air. The subjects reminded me of young marines I met in Iraq while embedded as a journalist. I found myself thinking: What happened to these kids after these pictures were captured?

Inside and up close, I saw the fine strokes of artist Mary Henderson's brush and realized these were paintings, not photographs. I sighed. I'm a photojournalist, and I harbor a certain skepticism toward photorealistic painting. Why not just hang the actual photos, save a step? But then I stepped back from the walls to truly look at the paintings before judging them.

While the paintings in the show, titled "Forces," are meticulously rendered, they aren't mimetic equivalents of photographs. Henderson's focus, gallery co-owner Michael Lyons Wier explains to me, is "the expressiveness in the physiognomy." Henderson knows light, and she plays with it in faces. She extrapolates from nature in the harsh glare of sunlight or a flash unit, interpolates in the shadows to achieve a buttery and glowing texture. Less salient details in the frame are given less obsessive attention. That's her "interpretive hand" at work, says Lyons Wier.

Henderson's brother, a US Navy Commander, served in Iraq in 2007. "She became fascinated with images that depicted soldiers in uniform, but in noncombat settings," the artist's bio reads. To produce the work, Henderson surfs photo-sharing websites, re-crops and refocuses the images, and then paints from the resulting image. She cites 19^th-century neo-classical painters Jacques-Louis David and Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres as inspirations. Not knowing who these gentlemen were - European art history troglodyte that I am - I offered a tentative comparison to Norman Rockwell in my chat with Lyons Wier and his partner Anna Ortt, hoping it wouldn't offend. It didn't. "Rockwell was a master realist, and he worked very politically in his painting," says Lyons Wier.

For me, Henderson's paintings evoke the oh-so-familiar feeling of "non-normal normalcy" - Henderson's term, according to Ortt - for the hurry-up-and wait rhythm of the military.

I leave the gallery feeling much like I do after spending time at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune, in North Carolina, photographing deploying troops, which I have done many times since 2004. There's an infectious sense of fun and frivolity in nearly every painting, a superficial allure to the bright and shiny faces. I want to latch onto these priceless and fleeting moments, even though I know they are constructed in Henderson's mind.

I hit Seventh Avenue on a bittersweet high, with an almost heartbreaking sense of impending loss.

Forces continues through Saturday, November 8^th at Lyons Wier Ortt Gallery, 175 Seventh Avenue, NYC. Please check website for information, or 212-242-6220.

Brian Palmer is an independent journalist and filmmaker based in Brooklyn, NY. He has written for Mother Jones, Newsday, The Crisis, Huffington Post, Pixel Press, Newsweek International, The New York Times Magazine, ColorLines, and other publications. From 2000 to 2002, he was an on-air correspondent with CNN. He was a staff writer at Fortune from 1998 to 2000 and Beijing Bureau Chief for US News & World Report for the two years prior to that. Palmer is currently in post production on Full Disclosure, a documentary about embedding with a US Marine infantry battalion in Iraq, for which he received a Ford Foundation grant.