George W.: portrait painter
‘HONESTLY OBSERVED AND PERSUASIVELY ALIVE’
If you haven’t seen the recent paintings by the artist formerly known as President George W. Bush, you can find them in a new book called Portraits of Courage: A Commander in Chief ’s Tribute to America’s Warriors.
It’s just become a New York Times best seller. The proceeds will go to a nonprofit organization that helps veterans and their families recover and rebuild from America’s post-Sept. 11 wars.
If the notion of Bush as a portrait painter is one your brain has trouble accommodating, you are not alone. Even his wife, Laura, admitted to some difficulty in her foreword to the book.
“If someone said, ‘ One day you will be writing a foreword for a book that includes George’s paintings,’ I would have said, ‘No way.’ ”
But the bigger surprise is that Bush paints well.
His early works, images of which circulated on the Internet in 2013, weren’t bad: one showed Bush’s toes and knees peeking from his bath water, another featured his naked back in the shower, with his all-too-familiar visage peering out from a shaving mirror. There were also some paintings of family pets: dogs and cats with cushy lives.
They were easy for art critics to dismiss as banal, yet they had a warmth and wit that reflected a side of Bush his political critics had never acknowledged.
A foray into portraiture followed, with a show of world leaders he had painted from photographs — then- prime minister Stephen Harper, Tony Blair, Angela Merkel, Vladimir Putin and others — that revealed a new sophistication of depth and colour.
In 2014, the senior art crit- ic f or New York magazine, Jerry Saltz, confessed to misunderestimating the former president. “When I first saw his paintings, I was sure I would hate them,” Saltz told CNN, but he found in them “something innocent, sincere, earnest, almost childlike.”
As f or t he work in t he new book, no less than The New Yorker’s art critic, Peter Schjeldahl, can barely hide his surprise when describing the quality as astonishingly high, the portraits “honestly observed and persuasively alive.” Why the shock and awe? Because Bush’s artistic talent goes against the stereotype we have of him. Despite his years at Yale and Harvard, he always remained the West Texas rich kid who would be proud to confuse Picasso with Pizarro. It was fine for Bush’s mother and his wife to promote the reading of books. But Bush himself worked overtime to make sure no one could mistake him for a pointyheaded intellectual. He painted himself into a corner.
What happened next provides a window into the privileges of presidential life, along with an escape hatch from it.
Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis, stopping by for a visit in 2012, suggested that Bush check out Winston Churchill’s book Painting as a Pastime. Bush, who said he had been feeling “antsy,” found himself inspired.
He took private lessons from Dallas artist Gail Norfleet. He began to see the colours even in shadows, the subtle shifts of palette in a clear blue sky.
“I was getting comfortable with the concepts of values and tones,” Bush writes in the introduction to his book. Norfleet also introduced the once monochromatic president to her mentor, another well- known Dallas artist named Roger Winter, and it was he who gave Bush the idea to paint world leaders.
Sedrick Huckaby, a Texasborn painter, suggested Bush paint people whom he knew, but who were strangers to others. Bush discovered that as he worked on their portraits, he came to understand his sitters, and their pain, as well as their love for one another.
A white woman in her 70s, a black man in his 40s and an older white man with a love for the wide-open spaces; that’s who taught President George W. Bush the transformative power of art.
BUSH’S ARTISTIC TALENT GOES AGAINST THE STEREOTYPE WE HAVE OF HIM. DESPITE HIS YEARS AT YALE AND HARVARD, HE ALWAYS REMAINED THE WEST TEXAS RICH KID WHO WOULD BE PROUD TO CONFUSE PICASSO WITH PIZARRO. — MIMI SWARTZ, TEXAS MONTHLY