A sign near Chris Demarest’s work space at the Bainbridge Public Library invites guests to peruse his historical portraits in the large meeting room, check out his new in-progress mural and to, “Ask me anything.”

He means it, too.

The Kitsap Regional Library artist in residence, a renowned illustrator of children’s books, has spent the past few years touring the country, showcasing a series of historical portraits based on World War II-era photographs and sharing stories, discussing history and meeting new people.

Currently, he’s visiting libraries around Kitsap exhibiting his work, and he’s making weekly appearances at the Bainbridge branch to continue his latest in-progress piece: a 7-foot-2-inch large identification tag on which he’s painting a narrative mural depicting the Japanese American experience in the tumultuous years between the Pearl Harbor attack and the end of World War II.

The internment saga — and Bainbridge Island — have been on Demarest’s radar for some time now, as a story he’s long wanted to examine.

“I remember my mother telling me about living in L.A. and seeing her friends disappear in early 1942,” Demarest said. “That stuck with me. So when I came to California I thought, ‘Well, I want to do the Japanese internment story.’ So I went to Manzanar a couple of times.”

From those early visits and a lot of research, Demarest began to create some pieces depicting the forced Japanese internment while simultaneously finishing his historical portrait series at the Palm Springs Air Museum.

All the while, the idea to do a larger project loomed in his mind, but it was not until after he reached out to the Bainbridge library branch manager Rebecca Judd that he settled on the concept of a mural.

“When I got to the island I was not sure exactly what I was going to paint because it’s such a huge, multifaceted story,” he said.

“So I thought, ‘I’ll just stretch a big canvas and do a montage of images,’ and then it hit me: Why not do something really out of the box and paint a giant identification tag?”

Visitors to the library can see Demarest at work, view his portraits in the meeting room and ask him “anything” from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. every Saturday through Nov. 26.

Islanders might be surprised, Demarest said, to learn that the shameful chapter of U.S. history we live with every day here is still so little known in other parts of the country. As he began his early internment-themed works in California, the artist said he was “shocked” that so many people are still unaware of the shameful treatment of Japanese Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

“When I was in California there were even some volunteers at the museum who didn’t know that much about it,” he said. “I was doing a painting one day of two little girls and their grandmother, very clearly wearing identification tags, and [a man] came up to me and said, ‘Oh, did they get new coats?’”

That wasn’t a one-time query either. Demarest said it kept happening again and again.

Even worse, he recalled the reactions of some people who did know about the internment and had, shall we say, perhaps taken a less than desirable message from the story?

“I was rudely, abruptly, shocked into the reality of where we are now because there were more than a handful of people who said to me, ‘Oh, that’s what they should do with all the Muslims,’” Demarest said.

“It was powerful. I looked at them and said, ‘All right, here’s a quick history lesson.’ And I ran it down: 120,000 arrested and zero — and I make that gesture with my hand in their face and say — ‘Zero convicted. You need to be careful. This is a red flag, whenever the word ‘all’ or ‘everyone’ comes to mind, because it’s never true.’”

Still, whether offering up an impromptu civics lesson, sharing someone’s touching personal story or simply informing the honestly curious, Demarest said any chance wherein his work might breed discussion is a win for him.

“There were some of the docents last year when I went back [to California] who knew the subject matter and they came up and they said, ‘You’re really good at painting Japs,’” he said. “So how do you respond to that other than you give them a look?

“Sometimes you think that’s the only way they’ve known and it’s too late to educate them. In other cases, when I know there’s hatred or ignorance behind it, then I again give them a history lesson.”

One particularly touching story involved a Canadian veteran who had never received his war medals. Another man was so inspired by Demarest’s painting of the vet that he did some checking and then began the official process to correct the oversight.

It was a simple paperwork error, turns out. But because of the circumstances around the man’s discharge — he was wounded trying to clear a jammed round from a weapon and then accused by the medics of malingering — he’d lived with the belief that he’d never been awarded his medals because the military believed him to be a coward.

The war ended just weeks after he was hurt and he promptly moved to America and never spoke about it again. But the pain and shame stuck with him as surely as the scarred wounds on his hand.

“On the weekend of Remembrance Day, their Veteran’s Day, we all went to Montreal and the remarkable part of it was not only did he get his medals but he was given his Wound Stripe — like our Purple Heart,” Demarest said. “In accepting that he told us the story of the day he was injured.

“He thought for all those 70 years they believed he was a coward,” the artist said. “And that sudden revelation to everybody, except for his wife and [the man who corrected the mistake], we were stunned. I saw in the armory, it had 200 men and women in uniform [with] tears streaming down their cheeks.”

Though he never served himself, Demarest’s interest in military culture and the stories of service members started after he worked as a United States Coast Guard artist. They took him to the Persian Gulf to live with and document crews guarding the oil platforms off the coast of Iraq. He also spent time flying with the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Advanced Response Team.

He is the author and illustrator of more than 100 children’s books. His “Firefighters: A to Z” was chosen as a New York Times Best Book in 2000 and his more recent “Arlington: The Story of our Nation’s Cemetery” was also widely praised.

Visit www.chrisdemarest.net to learn more.