Paintbrush diplomacy

Installed beneath the portraits, which are hung extremely high, are vitrines that display lavish diplomatic gifts bestowed on Bush by the dignitaries he depicts. Putin gave him a bejeweled red-velvet tome festooned with eagles, stars and stripes and a bas-relief of the Statue of Liberty. A strange cross between medieval treasury and Liberace, the gaudy book contains watercolor portraits of each American president up through 43. Alongside a jowly, Cheneyesque portrait of John Howard, the former prime minister of Australia, is a pair of custom-made black cowboy boots stitched out of crocodile, kangaroo and emu hides, next to a coiled Australian stock whip with a crocodile-skin handle. Many of the portraits are flanked by large photographs of Bush dressed in blue jeans, a leather flight jacket or a suit, negotiating, being chummy and yukking it up with his subjects. 

Bush is a beginning artist, an amateur. So it’s no surprise that he makes the usual rookie mistakes — the first and most blatant of which is that he works from memory and photographs. His illustrative paintings lack weight, volume, light and presence. They have no inner life. He favors the recognizable face over everything else in the portrait — chasing likenesses, not making paintings. The spaces surrounding his subjects’ heads, including their bodies, clothes and environments, are usually thin, weightless, brushy afterthoughts. (The exception here is in the toothy, ruddy portrait of the writer and former president of the Czech Republic, the late Václav Havel, who is surrounded by books.) Bush also seems more concerned with getting across how he feels about each person he’s painting than exploring his subjects with enough consideration to create a living work of art in its own right. Perhaps the paintings would have more presence if Bush were actually painting these portraits in the presence of the individuals.

In some of these portraits, however, Bush begins to let his freak flag fly. He gets inventive, straying and distorting from the photographs. His distortions are most likely evidence of awkwardness and a lack of control, but it’s through them that his portraits start to become interesting. In the otherwise straightforward portrait of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, one wonky eye rises and falls, as if caught by a rogue wave. In the deeply rutted wrinkles in Olusegun Obasanjo’s face, Bush presents the former president of Nigeria as if he were transforming into landscape. Particularly strange is the portrait of Álvaro Uribe Vélez, the former president of Colombia, in which Bush has severely truncated Uribe’s bent arm and painted his hand as a gourdlike claw. Almost certainly without being aware of it in these paintings, the artist begins to test the waters of art’s metaphoric possibilities — and that’s worthy of encouragement.