The President has said he's ready for Mount Rushmore. Granted his likenesses in a Trump Portrait Contest are less grand than 60-foot heads carved into the granite face of a mountain. But competition entries are far from sidewalk art that captures facial features in 15 minutes.
And the winners are....
Entertainment Partners (EP) reported the contest winners on April 3, and the work is remarkably skilled, savvy and wonderfully wicked. Trump is going to hate it. The competition, Run by the media company known as Crooked Media, received more than 1,000 submissions and internet users had a voice in the judging.
Eighteen entries made the cut. There were three winners:
Jamie Fontana painted Trump riding Putin piggy-back, characterizing him as a little boy, clinging to the Russian president like a scared child. Casey Promise portrayed him in a painstakingly exacting drawing that describes him vomiting up Twitter birds - literally regurgitating his bile in tweets. And Abigail Hammett pictured him metaphorically with a photo of a glazed donut tossed on a sidewalk like so much litter with a slice of American cheese folded over it like his comb-over hairdo. Notable among the finalists is Olivia Wolfe's detailed rendering of him in bed surrounded by fast food cartons. Overhead is an American flag held aloft by a pair of Twitter birds.
Look back in anger
Clearly, these artists are furious with Trump. Their work, so deliberately precise, speaks of a state of displeasure so deep and ongoing, that a caricature or quick sketch wouldn't satisfy. Such exasperation first showed up in 2016 when a well-crafted 6-foot-5 statue of a nude and decidedly lumpish Trump popped up in cities throughout the country during the run-up to the election.
What you saw was a stern-faced figure clasping his hands over an over-sized belly hanging over under-sized genitalia. A plaque at the foot of the statue tells you what else to ponder: “The Emperor has no balls.”
The naked truth
The Trump statue was created by an artist identified by a single name, Ginger, who is known for her figure art in monster movies.
Getting the work out in cities like New York, San Francisco, L.A. Cleveland and Seattle was the work of an activist collective called “Indecline.”
As if this sculpture, fastidiously molded out of 300 pounds of clay and silicone, wasn't enough, the group's press release also reflected indignation: “It’s our hope that Donald Trump, our modern day emperor of Fascism and Bigotry, is never installed in the most powerful political and military position in the world.”
The first angry man
A classic example of anger that called for retribution was Achilles, the hero of the Trojan War, except it didn't end well for him. His rage was famously played out in Homer's epic poem “The Iliad,” which tells us that his ire brought him to a tragic end. These artists clearly pissed off by Trump, made their anger work for them as well as for those who feel as they do.
