place in Salt Lake City through Saturday. The weeklong event is the culmination of an annual talent competition open to all veterans receiving care at Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) hospitals. Nationwide, almost 3,000 entered.
   The visual-art winners will display their work Friday night on the University of Utah campus, followed by a variety show.
   The winners in the visual-art category gathered Monday morning at the VA Medical Center in Salt Lake City to greet old friends, swap stories and discuss their work. They ranged from wizened World War II vets to young peacetime medics. Many struggle with service-related injuries and suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Almost all discovered their creative sides in VA art-therapy programs.
   James Heinle, a 57-year-old veteran of the Naval Reserve, is paralyzed from   the neck down by a spinal-cord injury. The Richmond, Va., man paints ceramic sculptures with a brush he holds in his teeth.
   Army vet Ray-Paul Nielsen of Seattle paints to deal with nightmares about his combat experiences in Vietnam. The nightmares are so intense that he wakes exhausted, smelling gun smoke and tasting blood. Nielsen tackled one recurring nightmare in an abstract painting he completed last year; since then, the nightmare has eased.
   For his award-winning work, "Faces of Buffalo," Brian Nesline solicited 999 self-portraits from residents of Buffalo, N.Y., then arranged them digitally in a composite that forms a larger image of a buffalo. His graphic-design work has helped him overcome an addiction he developed after suffering a back injury during Army basic training. "It gives me purpose," said the 36-year-old. "Before, I didn't really have anything I could hold onto that was positive."
   Warren Weldon won the festival's Best in Show award for his three-by-four-foot wool weaving inspired by the colors and symbols of Alaska, where he lives. The Air Force vet, 44, believes his loom work has helped him cope with his service injuries and a more recent diagnosis of Type 1 diabetes.
   "The artwork gave me my soul back," he said. "I started feeling great about it. And then I realized that what I really felt great about was myself."
   Most veterans chose art subjects unrelated to their service. But for some vets who saw combat, their art has allowed them to process horrors they could not verbalize.
   One such artist is Bill Elkins of El Reno, Okla., who used computer graphics to create an image of a grieving   veteran at the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. Inside the memorial wall is the ghostly face of the veteran's dead comrade.
   "Art has given me the ability to express things that I'd suppressed through the war - seeing friends die, and having to kill in order to survive," said Elkins, 60, who did two tours in Vietnam and was awarded the Purple Heart. "It's helped me talk about it."  griggs@sltrib.com