p>Barack Obama’s initiatives and plans have stirred debate on both sides of the aisle, but all Americans can agree about the hilarity of naive works collected on Badpaintingsofbarackobama.com.
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The designers of the online gallery showcasing these works gave the 47 paintings center-stage by placing the images against a white background and not including any text on the entire Web site.’
Most of the painters suffer from horrible misunderstandings of basic human anatomy, poor control of the medium, overuse of symbolism and just odd artistic decisions in portraying the U.S. president.’
The anatomy problems in many of these pieces seem reminiscent of the work found in introductory middle school art classes. Some of these artists clearly painted with an eye that had never been taught to look closely at the contours of a human face, such as the anonymous artist who reduced and painted Obama’s head about four times as large as it should be in proportion to his shoulders.
Common flaws in perspective and technical skill indicate that many of the anatomically incorrect pieces have been painted by inexperienced hands.’
Some pieces are dominated by symbolism that hinders the piece’s composition. Storm Ketron’s decision to paint Obama’s head bright green in the untitled ‘1.jpg’ clearly symbolizes the president’s commitment to environmental causes, but one questions the decision to portray his head in the center of the composition, hovering past a field of spinning windmills. In this work, symbolism dominated Ketron’s decision, which proves detrimental of the piece.
The symbolism in the anonymous and untitled ‘3.jpg’ is simply confusing. On an otherwise realistic portrayal of Obama, the artist has chosen to paint blue veins stretching across his face and a glowing earth in the middle of his forehead. White and red auras emanate from Obama’s naked shoulders and benevolent smile. The artist was attempting to communicate something, but it is not entirely clear what that is.
The infamous ‘4.jpg,’ which can be seen while wandering the Internet outside of this online gallery, portrays Obama’s facial proportions and surroundings with far more detail and realism than any other piece in the gallery, but was likely included for its bizarrely sexual portrayal of the president.’
In the provocative ‘4.jpg,’ Obama undoes an oversized golden belt buckle as 13 blooming roses explode from the white sea spray around his crotch.
However, berating the anonymous artists of many of these untitled pieces seems rather harsh. These challenging, uninhibited pieces portray common threads of discussion between many citizens in light of the president’s rock star campaign trail and election.’
These artists depict Obama as the culmination of the civil rights movement, the unifier of regions torn apart by economic, racial and religious tension, and the savior to a nation struggling to stay afloat despite a national debt in the trillions.’
Even the strangely sensual ‘4.jpg’ has something to say about the very sexual nation that marveled at leaked photographs of Obama’s abdominals in January.
These pieces’ terrible, unedited quality seems more sincere and approachable than the shouted commentary on biased political television, or the self-entitled berating of liberal college hipsters behind the keyboards of Macbooks.
The online gallery has no text and does not credit any curators or artists, but the images in the online gallery are hosted on the domain name of Cincinnati-based artist Christopher L. Collins, who was not available for comment.
While none of these pieces belong in a serious art museum on the merits of technical skill, there is something strangely noble about these works that merits a visit to http://badpaintingsofbarackobama.com/.
