Probably the first time I walked through there and saw the patchwork quilt of portraits, each president portrayed by a different artist, I wondered what criteria they used to pick the contributors. (This would have been back during the Clinton administration.)But I was an amateur cartoonist, not a prominent artist, so I figured no opportunity would present itself.
I’m foggy on how exactly the idea for “Magnetic Personality” came up. Jen thinks we arrived at it together, but I think it was mainly her brainchild. Once the idea existed, we bounced it around and honed it. I’m pleased with the approach; not only is it fun, it’s also a cool metaphor for this presidency. You see whatever you long for or whatever you fear.
Like I said, this was Jen’s baby, but the main thing she needed from me was a caricature of Obama that reflected the style of the Wooly Willy drawing. One evening, I sat on the back deck, my laptop featuring three or four photos of Obama for reference, and I sketched.
This was the first thing I came up with:
It kind of sucked. I’ve tried to draw Obama before, but for some reason I never managed to get hold of him. But I thought there were a few points in this attempt to grab hold of. I knew what to keep and what to discard in my next draft, and how to fit him into the cartoony style I was after:
Jen approved, so I inked it and photocopied a bunch of miniatures so we could test out the different personas Obama would take on. Then I scanned the full size version so Jen could work her magic.
The no-brainers were Hitler and Lincoln. Two well-worn comparisons, two easily recognized hairstyles.Jesus was tough. I tried him with a beard, but it was just too much. I decided the halo on its own was simple and clean, and it got the point across.
The Secret Muslim had its own problems. It was tough to draw an all-black turban without it looking like a big head of hair. We tried a fez, a burqua, and a bunch of different turban styles. I finally figured out (hoped) that a certain black shape, with a clean white line traversing it, set at just the right spot above the ears, would read (as long as it was accompanied by the white-streaked Osama bin Laden beard.)
For the fifth and final character we settled on, I tried to do a Black Panther, with the beret and the sunglasses. Then I tried to do Malcolm X, with the severe, close-cropped hair, the thin goatee, and the horn-rimmed glasses. They both had the same problem: the Obama caricature has a big, broad smile. You can’t portray a Black Panther or Malcolm X with a big, broad smile. In each case, he ended up looking like a 60s jazz musician between sets.
We settled on an afro and a pair of sunglasses. I thought it worked well, in that it wasn’t so much an Angry Black Man as just a black guy with his African American features blown out a little bit. I liked that this character could be seen as a positive or a negative, depending on the viewer. A black kid could see a President who finally looks kind of like him. A racist Tea-Party type could see a threat to what’s pure and lost about the country.
So: Two Positives (Lincoln, Jesus), Two Negatives (Terrorist, Hitler), and One Rorschach Test.
(A discarded archetype was the Communist. Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky have pretty specific hairstyles, but Trotsky ended up looking like Don King, and Marx looked like Santa Claus or Henrik Ibsen.)
Meanwhile, Jen laid out the picture electronically, based on an actual Wooly Willy picture. She blew it up and used some kind of art magic to give herself a rough outline on a big piece of poster board canvas. She bought a bunch of Wooly Willy-like toys and extracted their iron filings. She destroyed a refrigerator magnet and a makeup tube to make the magnetic stick. And she bought one of those labeled pill containers that old people use to keep track of all their medications, because the rectangular plastic package was about the right size to form the front cover.It was important to her that the piece was functional. You can give Obama a little Hitler mustache of you want to (as long as you place the painting on a horizontal plane).
The painting was due to the Neo-Futurists Friday afternoon. Thursday night, Jen settled in with her paints and her glue for a long, long night of art.
I finally said goodnight to her around 11. She was pretty sure she was going to work until daybreak.
• • •
We had a howling rainstorm that night. I drifted awake a few times. In the wee hours of the morning, I heard the back door to the deck open and shut. I figured Jen just needed some fresh air, and to gaze out at something far away for a while. Either that or she had gone insane and wandered out in the rain to walk into the Lake.
• • •
I woke up the next morning. At some point, Jen had slipped into bed, and she was immersed in fathomless sleep. I walked into the hall and looked into the kitchen.
For some reason, my new gas grill was standing in the kitchen. Jen had brought it in from the back deck.
Maybe she had gone insane.
Then I noticed all the furniture on the deck was turned on its side, the hammock was unhooked, and the metal shelving was supine. She wanted to protect everything from the wind.
I finally caught sight of the painting. It wasn’t completely done, but it was beautiful. It was well on its way to being fully realized, just the way we’d imagined it.
I can’t remember if I woke her up before I left for work. I think I just let her sleep and emailed her how great it looked.
• • •
Jen texted me later that she had finally finished it. Then she took a nap. Then she set out in a mad scramble to submit the portrait by its 5pm deadline and got there with 15 minutes to spare.
She wasn’t the last entrant to show up.
• • •
According to the submission info, we would hear by October 1 if our entry was a finalist. October 1 arrived, and we heard nothing. Jen texted me that afternoon that she didn’t think we’d made it. We would have heard by then.
Silence.
I got home that night, and Jen pulled herself into my arms and cried. She was sad at the prospect that we weren’t finalists, but underneath that was humiliation. She felt stupid for having entered, like her work didn’t belong in the company of real artists, and they were all rolling their eyes at her.
I put that to rest as best I could. And I assured her that we would show up at the fundraiser and bid on “Magnetic Personality” and bring it home to hang it.
A few days passed, and the contest passed out of our thoughts. Until the following Wednesday, when Jen sent me a text:
“Holy shit, we’re finalists.”
The Neo-Futurists’ had sent her an email that our painting was one of six finalists. I have no idea why we heard so late, but suddenly the world had twisted another 180 degrees.
• • •
The way you voted was to show up to a performance of Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind and fill out your ballot. All the paintings were on display in the lobby: the six finalists, as well as all the other entries (which you could write in if you were moved to). I went by myself one night when Jen was otherwise engaged.
There were a lot of great entries. One of them (not a finalist) touched on a similar theme to ours—a caricature of Obama, faceless, in the Oval Office as if he were giving a State of the Union Address. You the viewer projected the face of his presidency onto it. I liked it quite a bit.
All the finalists were great, but one stuck out. “Baby Obama,” featuring a portrait of Barack Obama as a little kid, probably five or six, smiling as if for a class photo. Around him, on the border of the painting, were tiny, postage-stamp-sized portraits of the 43 presidents who preceded him.
It was such a joyous, layered work. Staid, stolid white men forming the frame for the future leader of the free world. Rebirth, change, youth, optimism, evolution, all in a beautiful package. Jen, who saw the show the following weekend, pointed out part of the metaphor: the stamp-like portraits around the border had an inherent “old media” aspect to them, bringing the newness of Obama into even more relief.
In a surge of ridiculous optimism, I saw “Magnetic Personality” and “Baby Obama” as the frontrunners.
(I should also mention my other favorite, an intricate black-and-white piece by Lee Arjona. I had a hunch its small size would work against it, though.)
All the while, remembering Jen’s earlier disappointment, I made sure she was on board with this philosophy: It Was Okay If We Didn’t Win. She agreed. Being a finalist was the glory she sought.
• • •
The winner was to be announced at a fundraiser on October 28. Food, drinks, and performances, plus auctions of all the entries. Jen and I, as finalists, received free admission.
At the fundraiser, the six finalists were revealed one by one, auctioned off inversely to the number of votes they got. The plan was for the auctions to be spaced out over the course of the evening, so that the runner-up and winner would be revealed at the end.
Numbers six, five, four, and three were taken down from the wall, and the bidding was spirited and profitable. As I predicted, “Magnetic Personality” and “Baby Obama” were the top two.
And then something odd happened. Greg Allen, who was in charge of the auctions, lost track of how many finalists he had revealed. It was still early in the night, and there were two paintings left, and suddenly I looked over Jen’s shoulder and noticed that they were taking “Baby Obama” off the wall to be auctioned.
I turned around and looked toward our portrait on the opposite wall. It still hung there, untouched.
“Baby, don’t look now, but I think we won,” I said.
Sure enough, when the staff tried to hand “Baby Obama” to Greg, he tried to wave them away, worried that they had brought up the wrong painting. After a long, protracted conversation, he finally realized that there were not three finalists left, but only two.
And he had just accidentally revealed which of them had come in second, and therefore, which of them had won.
The early revelation may not have been as dramatic as intended, but Jen and I watched the rest of the evening’s entertainment at ease and happy. At the end of the evening, the now-ruined surprise was revealed: “Magnetic Personality” had won. We were handed a giant novelty check and our picture was taken.
As of this writing, I don’t think it’s hanging in the theatre yet. Jen stopped by and made a couple of touch-ups on Tuesday. But before too long, it will be part of the official Neo-Futurist record of the country’s history.
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