The artist behind the “worst” portrait of Trump defends his work: NPR

After President Trump said how much he did not like a painted portrait of him suspended in the Colorado State Capitol, the artist now says that his blow to his capacities threatened his livelihood for several decades.

Sarah Boardman painted the portrait of Capitol Building in Denver, where he was suspended from 2019, after being ordered during Trump’s first term. Other presidential paintings line the walls of the building rotunda, including the representation by Boardman of former President Barack Obama.

Last month, Trump declared in an article on Truth Social that the portrait “was deliberately distorted”.

Although he rents his portrait of President Obama, Trump said that “the one on me is really the worst”.

He then degraded boardman’s talents, without naming it. “She must have lost her talent as they get older,” wrote the president. “I prefer to have no image to have it.”

Shortly after Trump’s insult, state republicans had the portrait removed.

Boardman responded to Trump’s comments during the weekend in a statement on his website. The painter based in Colorado Springs said that the words of the president called into question his “intentions, his integrity and his capacities”.

She said that she had created the rendering without political bias or any intention to distort or caricature of the president. Boardman said that her portrait of Trump had received extremely positive feedback during the six years she was suspended in the Capitol Building rotunda, but that Trump’s recent comments “now have a directly and negative impact on my more than 41 -year -old business who is now likely not to recover.”

According to the biography of her website, Boardman studied painting in Germany on a learning in which she practiced the techniques of “old masters” – a group of famous European artists going back to the Renaissance, like Rembrandt. She also painted former president George W. Bush, judge of the district court and members of the US military. But, says his biography, some of his favorite subjects are “wonderfully ordinary people”.

The artist has not developed the consequences of his business.

The Republicans collected $ 11,000 in donations to order oil painting, Public Radio Colorado reported.

The head of the minority of the Senate of the State of Colorado, Paul Lundeen, said that he had asked for the withdrawal of the portrait so that he could be replaced by a “contemporary resemblance” of Trump. As the RCR reported: “He declared that he followed a precedent established by the other president of the country to serve non -consecutive terms, Grover Cleveland, who is represented in the gallery by a single portrait of his second term.”

Trump follows other presidents who hated their portraits.

Theodore Roosevelt, for example, was disappointed by the representation of the French artist Theobald Chartran of him from 1902, Weta reported. The Roosevelt family estimated that painting project proud leader who loves nature as sweet, and nicknamed the work of “meowing”.

And Lyndon B. Johnson called his portrait the “ugliest thing I have ever seen”. Peter Hurd, a successful artist who painted the work, rejected the president’s “very damn big” behavior in his comments to the press, according to Smithsonian Magazine.

A portrait of Richard Nixon was quietly climbed to the White House in 1981, years after his resignation on the Watergate scandal. He was not satisfied with painting and in 1984, he rather gave a fact by James Anthony Wills, who had painted the portrait of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. “He liked it better,” said a federal official The Washington Post.