A couple of months ago, some rightwing knucklehead tried to start a boycott campaign against me because I painted a picture of Donald Drumpf.
A little background: After getting laid off from a large tech company a few years ago, I decided to reinvent his life in the most rational way possible: I picked up a pen and began drawing portraits of every single U.S. vice president with an octopus on his head. For some reason, it struck a chord and a bunch of people gave me money on Kickstarter to turn my portraits into a single volume called Veeptopus: 48 Vice Presidents with Octopuses on Their Heads. The book is now available on Amazon.
Since then I’ve been looking around for ways to expand and deepen my work. So I’ve started oil painting.
“Oil painting is serious,” said my dour, thin-lipped teacher when I took my one and only oil painting class in college back during the Clinton administration. And thanks to that class where a spent a semester painting dismal bowls of fruit, I’ve always been daunted by the medium. In spite of that, I picked up a brush a couple of months ago and attempted to paint a more realistic version of a drawing that I did back in 2015. The picture was a lot funnier back then.
Considering I had no real idea of what I was doing, I was pretty pleased with the results. So I posted the image on my Instagram and Facebook pages. People seemed to dig it too. Late one night, I posted it onto a Facebook group innocuously named something like “Watercolor, Acrylic and Oil Painting.”
It honestly didn’t cross my mind that people might find this painting offensive but holy shit they did. See, what I realized when I got back on the web the following morning is that Facebook group should have been called “Angry Drumpf Supporters who Sometimes Paint Watercolor, Acrylic, and Oil.” There were roughly 900 comments on my painting, many were so vitriolic that they were kind of funny. The administrator of the group took down the picture before I could make a thorough record but “Asshole” was thrown around a lot. “California” was used as an epithet. And one guy who liked to paint pictures of his truck said I had no talent. Some other guy even photoshopped me against a Soviet flag which still doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. And one irate snowflake tried to launch that Twitter campaign to boycott me. It didn’t really take off. And good thing too because without the support of Trumperistas, I might just go out of business.
At the time, I laughed off the kerfuffle, promising myself to be more careful on where I post my work. But since horribleness in Charlottesville and the ugliness of Drumpf’s NFL rants this past weekend, I’ve felt more and more unnerved by my run-in with the rabid right. I painted a mildly satirical picture of a sitting U.S. president that would not have received more than an eye roll in the past from people on the other side of the political aisle. Now, I get a barrage of personal insults and an attempted internet boycott. It’s chilling what’s happening to civil discourse in this country. I am more committed than ever to speak out.
After all, oil painting and art, in general, is serious.