A More Grotesque Version of Their Best Selves

The series statement is short enough to hang on a studio wall:

A person has a calling for public service because they want to affect the policies that affect everyone. Some policymakers swell to celebrity status. Success often perverts any good intention. In these portraits, I’m trying to capture a truth between the ideal and the grotesque.

That is the whole program. Not endorsement. Not opposition research. A face, pushed until it tells on itself.

American politics has always produced celebrities. What is new is the speed with which a senator, a governor, a fund manager, or a mayor becomes a look. Hair. Teeth. A particular fold beside the mouth. A single feature that can survive a phone screen at an inch tall. Once that happens, the person is no longer only a vote-counter. They are a typeface.

Political Portraits treats that typeface as subject matter.

Recognizable by a single feature

Jason Kobs wrote that these figures “are recognizable by their look, their style, and sometimes as little as a single feature.” That is a draftsman’s sentence. It is also a diagnosis of the feed.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in the ink drawing nicknamed Starfish, is not a press photo with extra hatching. She is a set of shapes that have already been memed, photographed, and argued over — then rebuilt in line so the argument has to sit still. Mitch McConnell is a topography of restraint. Hillary Clinton, in a murkier ink sitting, is a public life that has been drawn so many times the challenge is not likeness. The challenge is not making a bumper sticker.

Donald Trump’s smirk, in graphite, is almost too easy, which is why it is worth doing slowly. Easy faces are where a hand gets lazy. Graphite will not let you be lazy for long. The smirk has to be constructed from value, not from the idea of a smirk. If it fails, everyone in the country can tell you. That is the sport of political portraiture. The audience already knows the sitter.

Ideal, then grotesque, then something in between

Official portraiture is in the business of the ideal. The National Portrait Gallery is a cathedral of that business: oil, pose, flag, gaze into legacy. Campaign photography is in the business of the useful ideal — warmth, grit, vigor, whichever is polling.

The grotesque is the other pole: the caricature, the late-night impression, the stretched mouth, the reddened ear. It is often more honest than the oil, and just as commercial.

The interesting work happens in the weather between those poles. A mixed-media Biden can be tender without becoming a tribute. A wild-ink Trump can be ferocious without becoming a rally poster. King Charles III, drawn in marker and ink, is neither postage stamp nor tabloid. He is a man whose face has been a job for seventy years.

That in-between is what people actually live with. We do not experience politicians as either saints or cartoons. We experience them as a pressure in the room — a voice, a clip, a decision that arrives in the body as irritation or relief. A drawing that only flatters cannot hold that pressure. A drawing that only sneers cannot either. The sneer is just another kind of flattery, aimed at the buyer instead of the sitter.

Why this sells, if we are being honest

People do not buy original political art because they lack photographs. They buy it because a photograph is news, and a drawing is a position.

Hang an original of Theodore Roosevelt and you are making a claim about lineage. Hang Starfish and you are making a claim about the present. Hang a smirking graphite Trump in a room of serious furniture and you have started a conversation whether you meant to or not. That is the use of the work. It is not décor that happens to have a famous name. It is a famous name forced back into handmade scale.

The shop at politicalportraits.com is organized the way a mind actually looks at this material: by medium, by party, by office, by obsession. You can shop Republicans or Democrats or ink or graphite. The honest way to shop it is by the face you cannot stop seeing.

If the series has a thesis, it is that public life turns people into pictures, and pictures can be made to tell the truth again — not the policy truth, which is someone else’s job, but the facial truth. The one that remains after the speech ends.

Buy the face that already lives in your head. Then live with the version that was drawn, not the version that was posted.