Former President George W. Bush is a fair and improving amateur painter. Since leaving office he has devoted time to painting and his “Portraits of Courage” , currently No. 1 on The Washington Post bestseller list.
There is another side to President Bush not often seen during his presidency. It is a more reflective side that shows empathy and sympathy. The qualities are present in his paintings and “Portraits of Courage” .
From The Washington Post:
George W. Bush is getting better as a painter. It’s been four years since a Romanian hacker named Marcel Lazar Lehel (a.k.a. Guccifer) hacked into Bush family email and exposed to the world the former president’s early paintings, including two self-portraits made in the bathroom. Guccifer is now in jail, but Bush is still at the easel and has released a volume of his recent work, portraits of military personnel and veterans who have served the country since Sept. 11, 2001.
“Portraits of Courage,” currently No. 1 on The Washington Post bestseller list, includes 66 individual portraits and a foldout reproduction of a four-panel mural. Most of the images are made from photographs, focused on the face and thickly painted with a limited but generally bright palette of colors. Highlights and shadows are strongly emphasized, and Bush lavishes particular attention on the eyes and exaggerates bone structure. A few of the paintings capture their subjects in motion — including Staff Sgt. Scott P. Lilley (who lost a part of his skull in an IED attack) holding his daughter, and Sgt. Saul Martinez (who lost both legs in Iraq) playing golf. But most of them show the head and face full size, seemingly bursting out of the frame with genuine presence and considerable expressive energy.
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Bush’s opening essay and the capsule biographies he writes about each subject are charming. He lightly ribs his mother in this account of his first experience with the paint brush: “For the first time in my sixty-six years, I picked up a paintbrush that wasn’t meant for drywall. I selected tube of white paint and another labeled Burnt Umber. While I wasn’t aware at the time that it was a color, I liked the name, which reminded me of Mother’s cooking.”
In his descriptions of the men and women he paints, he cites their struggles with grievous war wounds, post-traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injury and the myriad difficulties of reintegrating into civilian life. Although there is increasing concern in the medical community about whether we are over-diagnosing PTSD and including too many disparate psychological issues under its label, there is genuine empathy in Bush’s embrace of the stories told by these soldiers.
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Cynics will see a familiar, guy’s-guy tribalism in these accounts — many key episodes in Bush’s relationship with these people happen on the mountain bike trail — but his sympathy and understanding ring true. Those who think what now seems to be the case, that the war in Iraq was the most catastrophic foreign policy mistake this country ever made, will not find these paintings sufficient absolution for the cost, the trauma (here and in Iraq) and what will probably be decades of regional destabilization wrought by the war.
But that doesn’t seem to be Bush’s intent, or the purpose of this book, the profits from which will be donated to a military and veterans’ initiative run by the George W. Bush Presidential Center. There is nothing in this volume to support the thesis that Bush is using painting to work through his demons, or any regrets he may have about the wars he initiated.
There is, however, ample evidence that the former president is more humble and curious than the Swaggering President Bush he enacted while in office. And his curiosity about art is not only genuine but relatively sophisticated.
It’s worth making some distinctions. There is the presidency, the president and the man who is or was the president. Since the rise of Donald Trump, Bush’s respect for the institution of the presidency — especially the way he has honored the unwritten rules of conduct for how a president retires and the respect he shows his successors — has been seen in sharp relief. And while many may still strongly disagree with what he did as president — as a partisan political actor — that is now being tempered by a better understanding of who he is as a man. …
Say what one may about GWB he was, and is, more presidential as well as more human than Donald J. Trump will likely ever be.