W’s art is met with derision by all who opposed him politically, and they revel in his struggles, his vulnerability, his naive honest attempts to make images. It’s the same for all of us but he get’s pilloried as stand-in for every painter who’s taken those chances but never received even ugly reviews. This is a time of reflection he’s never known before, an attempt to struggle with limitation and doubt, and one can only wish he’d tried it sooner.
He claims as his inspiration Winston Churchill who took his painting quite seriously. He compared the strategy of making a painting to mounting a military campaign and it had more credibility coming from him than, say, me. Still, I’m pretty sure I know what he meant. Painting will teach W something about delayed gratification and cause and effect, even unintended consequences, and that’s all before he leaves the studio. He’ll also learn something about the hollow horn of art criticism from people who find profundity in a drip, a smear, some petulant display of ego-inflamed/such genius.
W just started and for that he isn’t so bad. Given a couple more decades at the easel he might be posing and resolving deep universal human issues, and who could doubt he’d make a better president?
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