There are many poor choices involved here, but one straightup mistake I made was not skipping the first fifteen minutes of this video, which was so insipid it left me unable to keep watching the actual event for more than nine months. Nine months of this thing sitting in my tabs, paralyzing me like a wireless fence whenever I’d get too close or it started autoplaying.
Well, the world is in a state where listening to the experiences of George W. Bush’s three art teachers is officially a less-worse option than [gestures around] all this. And that’s what the questions, the anecdotes, the uncomfortable pauses, were all about: what was it like meeting and interacting with Bush?
The event took place in 2017, at his center, during the exhibition of his paintings of veterans wounded in his war. I wrote about that show when it came to the Kennedy Center in 2020.
The instructors talked about several informative things: Bush’s color sense, his bravery with paint and facture, his grit, his developmental timeline, the dynamic synthesis of subject and process the veterans portraits represented.
His first teacher spoke about bringing art history into the studio. They studied Lucian Freud very intensely, which makes sense. Fairfield Porter, not quite so much. Bush took an online class of early modernism at MoMA. He developed an appreciation of the process of making a painting.
The most chilling thing was the last teacher, who was warily but legitimately excited for the new ground Bush would break as an ex-president-turned-artist. Not painter, but artist. What civilizational breakthrough would this lead to? he wondered. I wondered if he’d develop an interest in Vermeer and end up taking himself to The Hague.
Then I remembered that this video is seven years old. And though they talked about Bush working up the courage to paint trees, I realize I have seen and heard absolutely nothing about his painting since this video came out. If George Bush is an artist, his practice has pulled him entirely out of the world, and it’s taken his art with it.