Learning lessons from wars past - Sandow Birk takes inspiration from 17th and 19th century artists to render his vision of the Iraq conflict's toll.

Sandow Birk's painting "In Days of War" depicts a young man hunched before a large, blank canvas. The studio is littered with paint splatters and other signs of artistic activity, but instead of a brush, the artist holds a newspaper in his hands.

Birk describes the image as "the daily confrontation of sitting down and trying to figure out, with all these things happening, what can you do." It's a familiar dilemma for the Los Angeles-based artist, 45, who has been combining hard-hitting social and political commentary with cheeky art historical references since the early '90s.

In his latest exhibition, on view at Cal State Long Beach's University Art Museum through Dec. 16, Birk turns his irreverent eye to the conflict in Iraq. In addition to "In Days of War," the show includes related paintings and a monumental cycle of 15 black-and-white woodcut prints. Executed in a stark, high-contrast style, "The Depravities of War" tells an iconic tale of the recruitment and training of troops, the invasion and ensuing insurgency, the scandal at Abu Ghraib and the plight of injured and neglected veterans.

Birk first came across the Callot prints in 2005, during a residency at HuiPress in Maui, Hawaii. He was immediately struck by their similarity to the events taking place in Iraq and impressed by their candor about the brutality of war. In the Callot images, "Things start to go bad, and soldiers start to desert, and the peasants rise up and it doesn't go as smoothly as heroic painting would present it," he says. "In the end you see the soldiers coming home wounded. That was really something about his work that I admired."

The images in "Depravities" often quote Callot directly, cloaking his compositions in the trappings of present-day Iraq and the U.S. "If he had a picture of a street with a tree on the right, then I would do a street with a tree on the right," Birk says. For reference, he amassed a thick folder of war images from newspapers and websites. "If I needed a house, I would find a photo of an actual house in Baghdad and try to use that."