Bush's Painting and Putin's Dogs

I think the reason that people talk about the paintings of former President George W. Bush is because we think this is a less controversial topic than his presidency, and might well wonder what might have been if he took up a brush some time before deciding to go into politics. With the unveiling of portraits of world figures, however, the politician and the painter collide.

I find the portrait of Putin to be interesting because Bush has the simple, unfussy style that might come from having taken up art late in life. But in the asymmetry of the face of Vladimir Putin, one wonders if this is a deliberate choice of the artist? Is it possible the painter, Bush, has the ability to "do nuance" that the politician did not?  The observer looks at one face, two faces look back. Not a bad rendering, one might say, of a figure into whose soul one might have supposed to look--and who had yet deeper, more opaque layers, no?

But I find the observation that Putin had a kind of one-upsmanship about his dogs versus the former president's kind of absurd and yet very real. All this shirtless horse-riding and wild animal business suggests an affinity for an idealized hyper-masculinism, so "My dogs are bigger than yours"--as if the size of one's dog is an extension of one's, um, virility? Fits Putin's image So. Much.

(No endorsement of Bush or any of his political works intended, mind you.)

George Bush--If only he found painting a little sooner...

At my other blog, I would go into how much I don't like the administration of GWB and what a miserable, incalculable, wretched load of damage he'd done to the state of the economy, American prestige, our foreign policy, how he made a hash of the War on Terror and the dreadful Iraq war and all of that--

Yet, as a person who isn't completely insensitive to art, I will say there is something specifically appealing, if still crude, regarding his style and choice of compostion as a painter. There are definitely issues of perspective, line, and detail that take a long time to really master and which he has some consistency problems with--but his dogs do have personality. Following through to the Gawker link, there are certain things he picks up visually, like the light reflecting the smooth roundness of grapes, or the play of colors in landscape paintings, that show an aptitude that might have really taken off if nurtured sooner.

And, you know, he might have been able to avoid politics, altogether. It has been suggested that he could command quite a bit for his canvasses on the strength of his name alone. If the proceeds went to, say, Katrina victims, or war refugees, one would not think that out of line at all.