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Do I even need to say anything?

yeesh

Rejoice! Our 44th president got himself put on a shower curtain this week!

No, seriously, that’s some tacky ugly shit. I tried to find a “contact sheet” of all the presidential portraits so you could see how badly this one stands out, but Wikipedia won’t list the last four in their article. The artists were privately employed so the images are not in the public domain. Who knew?

The best bit is watching snooty snoots like the New York Times try to pass this off as a work of…something other than tasteless eye rape. The cringe!

I know about his two different mock recreations of Judith Beheading Holofernes, substituting black women for Judith and white women for Holofernes. Meh. I went to art school. Nay, thou canst not shock me with irreverence. You’da thunk that would take somebody out of the reckoning for a presidential portrait, though, but oh well.

No, the REAL best bit? Kehinde Wiley — the ‘highest paid artist of his generation’ — may not even have painted it himself. He maintains a studio in China, where four to ten ‘assistants’ do the grunt work. Like paint the pictures.

There’s nothing new about artists using assistants—everyone from Michelangelo to Jeff Koons has employed teams of helpers, with varying degrees of irony and pride—but Wiley gets uncomfortable discussing the subject. “I’m sensitive to it,” he says. When I first arrived at his Beijing studio, the assistants had left, and he made me delete the iPhone snapshots I’d taken of the empty space. It’s not that he wants people to believe every brushstroke is his, he says. That they aren’t is public ­knowledge. It’s just a question of boundaries. “I don’t want you to know every aspect of where my hand starts and ends, or how many layers go underneath the skin, or how I got that glow to happen,” he says. “It’s the secret sauce! Get out of my kitchen!”

I assume he once painted his own pictures, in their entirety, in a similar kind of style. For some reason.

Oh, hey, Michelle’s is a corker, too. Not as aggressively tacky, but the likeness is awful.

Comments


Comment from p2
Time: February 13, 2018, 9:23 pm

one almost gets the impression he’s given up searching for that presidential titleist he sliced into the brush trying to reach the green in two on a par five….. penalty stroke??? whazzat?


Comment from Deborah HH
Time: February 13, 2018, 9:52 pm

I couldn’t be more pleased with these Obama portraits. ;-/


Comment from Uncle Al
Time: February 13, 2018, 9:53 pm

Secret sauce? Ketchup.


Comment from Uncle Al
Time: February 13, 2018, 9:55 pm

Stoaty – I’m really, really, reallyreallyreally looking forward to your commentary on Big Maw’s portrait. Tomorrow?


Comment from Monty James
Time: February 13, 2018, 9:58 pm

Apparently Kehinde Wiley, Super Genius, used copied and pasted digital foliage for the background:

https://twitter.com/BadIdeasVs/status/963293238705582081

This is poster art. Like I said previously, this, and Michelle’s portrait, would be the sort of thing you see in an outdoor wall mural in the ghetto.

Actually, it does sort of capture the spirit of his administration, doesn’t it?


Comment from Anonymous
Time: February 13, 2018, 10:11 pm

Take a look at Barry Sotero’s left hand in the painting and let me know if you see anything unusual about it. Hit PJMedia for a hint. Tried to post tinyurl linky and got marked as spam.


Comment from DurnedYankee
Time: February 13, 2018, 10:13 pm

At the risk of twitterpating everyone – here’s a nice montage of some real portraits to contrast with President Lostin TehWeeds.

https://twitter.com/11S_L_2016_Cat/status/963181947768930304/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc

Frankly I’m glad he thought it was good, because future generations will think it was F*ing stupid and a lousy portrait. And hopefully by then we’ll have gotten over the idiotic can’t tell the truth because raciss crap we’re in right now.

And he has lurch hands – in addition to that extra digit, used to count 58 states.


Comment from QuasiModo
Time: February 13, 2018, 10:17 pm

@Anonymous: Someone pointed out that it looks like he has an extra pinky tucked under his left hand and that he has 2 middle fingers.


Comment from gromulin
Time: February 13, 2018, 10:22 pm

Actually it looks way better in B/W. Still looks like Alfred E. Neuman with a good tan.


Comment from OldFert
Time: February 13, 2018, 11:05 pm

But but but but but…

He’s the smartest and bestest prezydent we’ve ever had, and his Mrs is the most beautifulest with the bestest toned arms of any previous presidential beard, uh, I mean wife.

May they, and their frenemies, the Clintons, burn in hell.


Comment from Ric Fan
Time: February 13, 2018, 11:33 pm

I’ve watched a few of these olympic events and I am impressed with some of these young Americans. Besides their talent it cracks me up when they show their true feelings, e.g., Mirai Nagasu and Chloe Kim. The LGBT big mouths you can have.

USA! USA! USA!


Comment from LesterIII
Time: February 14, 2018, 12:58 am

I believe there was a conscious choice to put those Close Encounters of the Third Kind set-pieces right over his (TRIGGER WARNING) Man Spreading!

What a bunch of hypocritical fuckwits, hiding in plain sight.


Comment from xul’s fedora
Time: February 14, 2018, 1:29 am

These “paintings” are as crap as their subject matter, so quite fitting!

@Monty James So my initial impression that it looked like a bad Photoshop was correct. LOL


Comment from Ric Fan
Time: February 14, 2018, 2:06 am

So, how much did they pay for it? There’s a fortune to be made in crappy art. Saw some installation in the British Museum which consisted of 5 gal oil cans, strings of lights, and a looped tape of someone saying some gibberish. Now this was 10 years ago and the artist got 60,000 pounds and they acted like it was a bargain.


Comment from Some Vegetable
Time: February 14, 2018, 2:13 am

I’d love to have a trained artist (hmmm, who)do a critique of all the things wrong with this portrait. It just seems awkward and somehow amateurish to me, but I can’t specifically say why and I don’t have the training to figure it out. The face seems too photorealistic somehow… an exact tracing with no softening to add some humanity.

Mooch’s looks like a poster from college days… I can’t quite place it but it seems like a copy of something I remember.

Add


Comment from peacelovewoodstock
Time: February 14, 2018, 12:00 pm

Local talk show host Chris Plante said it looks like he’s taking a dump by the back wall at Wrigley Field. No way to unhear that.


Comment from J.S.Bridges
Time: February 14, 2018, 12:27 pm

Calendar art – for cheap, paint-by-number-grade calendars…the kind of stuff you find on the four-for-a-buck table at the local Dollar store…kind of off-handed appropriate, in way, though, given that ol’ Barky was lost in the woods for just about his entire 8-year tenure as the radical Leftist Chi-Town/Demoncrap talking-empty-headed speech-reader and jive-dancin’ puppet.

Da Mooch came off looking much better than warranted – they managed to make that lantern-jawed Wookieness almost disappear, and mostly concealed her three-triple-cheeseburgers-and-a-double-thickness-chocolate-malt-a-day thick-waistedness and pretty successfully minimized that truly huuuuuge bum of hers…still, pretty cartoony-ish.

SomeVeg – you may have a point, there – I remember that “Whipped Cream And Other Delights” thingy from colletch daze.

Soon to become gas-station-bathroom wall-calendar-art everywhere. Sorry, but – no, just know…cheapy, low-grade wall poster stuff…

(Five fingers, and no thumb, hmmm-m-m?…knew he was left-handed, but still…)


Comment from Durnedyankee
Time: February 14, 2018, 12:41 pm

Michelle should wish to look half as good as the whip cream wearing young lass.


Comment from Anonymous
Time: February 14, 2018, 12:43 pm

a nice collection from the cube
http://thepeoplescube.com/peoples-blog/the-obamas-official-portraits-t19961.html


Comment from DurnedYankee
Time: February 14, 2018, 3:41 pm

After some research I was able to uncover a first draft of the Obama Presidential portrait.

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/5a/24/7b/5a247b6cdee12b822b17fa0aa36f42f3–monty-python-fun-house.jpg


Comment from Wolfus Aurelius
Time: February 14, 2018, 5:10 pm

The utter nonsense of all this pretense that Jugears and the Wookie are “special” . . . well, I’m just about speechless.


Comment from Monty James
Time: February 14, 2018, 7:59 pm

First attempt with GIMP:

https://kek.gg/i/6n9tnC.png

Huh. That worked.


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: February 14, 2018, 9:33 pm

Well done, Monty James. I have never warmed to GIMP. I have to use it at work, and none of the controls are where I want them to be. I understand you can skin it to act more like Photoshop, but I haven’t gotten along with that, either.

Thing is, you guys — Obama is so stuck up and thin-skinned. He must know people are laughing at this thing, and even he must see how stupid it looks next to the others. You reckon he has buyer’s remorse?


Comment from Monty James
Time: February 14, 2018, 11:04 pm

Praise from you makes me purr like a cat, ma’am.

Buyer’s remorse–well, he knew the artist he chose had a “kill whitey” fetish. I don’t think there’s much of a trick to these official portraits; just straight-ahead representational art done in what I think is called the academic style. No need to get fancy. America’s history making first, and last, black president wanted to make a statement. He made a statement, all right.

I found this. It’s not a contact sheet, but it’s close. Where’s Waldo?:

https://kek.gg/i/4f4CR4.png


Comment from Anonymous
Time: February 15, 2018, 12:16 am

That’s a good start, Monty James, but you need to stick a dildo in there somewhere. And a prayer rug.


Comment from drew458
Time: February 15, 2018, 11:57 am

Inigo Montoya: I do not mean to pry, but you don’t by any chance happen to have six fingers on your right left hand?

That, and his hands are insanely long. Artist painted his wrist halfway down his forearm. Is this a human, or a raccoon?


Comment from Steve Skubinna
Time: February 15, 2018, 5:37 pm

The people swooning over these paintings make a point of sneering at Thomas Kinkaide.

Now I’m not going to stand up for Kinkaide, but if you’re going to crap all over him and then present this stuff as what art is supposed to be… well, “idiot” is too kind a word.


Comment from BJM
Time: February 16, 2018, 4:22 am

What? You were expecting good taste from these two?


Comment from tomfrompv
Time: February 16, 2018, 8:08 am

Drew458 got it right. The guy’s hands are way out of proportion. Those two middle fingers are 9 or 10 inches long too. I mean, take a ruler or something and compare the length of the hands to the width or his chest. Or length of his face. Anything. Terrible artist.

OR, is there a message hidden in this? The long “hands” of Obama equates to something else?

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