Bush portraits meet with generous response

IT’S always either brave or foolhardy of those who are famous in other ways to display their artistic hobbies in public.

Bush's depiction of the Dalai Lama. "I spent a lot of time on personal diplomacy and I be

IT’S always either brave or foolhardy of those who are famous in other ways to display their artistic hobbies in public, and all the more so if they are people who tend to provoke violent differences of opinion in viewers.

It’s not hard to imagine a range of comments from various of our acquaintances if, say, John Howard or Paul Keating suddenly revealed a corpus of unsuspected pictures, poems or string quartets. Not to mention Mark Latham or Tony Abbott … the sad thing is how predictable most of the reactions would be.

Under the circumstances, George W. Bush has met with a fairly generous response to his first collection of portraits of the world leaders he had the opportunity of knowing exceptionally well during his years in office.

And they are not too bad for an amateur, and given that they are inevitably painted from photographs, which — as the Archibald Prize reminds us every year — means that they are fundamentally limited by their source material.

Paintings based on photographs usually look like colouring-in, instead of something made anew in another medium, but here, as in the portrait of Vladimir Putin, a certain naïve execution saves the pictures from being slick copies of snaps and opens a space for Bush to convey his feeling about the subjects.

The striking portrait of Putin, for example, with lopsided features and awkwardly matched areas of light and shade, distantly reminds one of the naïve style used by Sidney Nolan and captures of much of the Russian leader’s narrow and dogged character.

Perhaps the element of antagonism in this relationship — though Bush says all the pictures are testaments to friendly relations — helps explain this picture’s strength; some of the people of whom he is fonder are not painted in so penetrating a way.

Tony Blair, for example, seems rather absent, while the portrait of Mr Howard shows why it is preferable not to paint someone grinning; similarly, the portrait of the Dalai Lama is rather too sweet, while that of Hamid Karzai, the outgoing President of Afghanistan, is perceptive, not only of the man’s personality, but of the weight, dilemmas and sheer personal danger of ruling his country.