To celebrate the end of this 8-year disaster, I wanted to look back at some of the Bush illustrations I created over the years. Above is a portrait from a series I painted of all of the U.S. Presidents. (I am very excited to paint the next one...)
And below are some of the Bush illustrations I made for the Seattle Weekly Newspaper. When looking through my archive, I have drawings of Bush growing a Pinnochio nose, chopping down trees, riding a nuclear missile, and driving a wrecking ball through a group of senior citizens.
Here is a more harmonious piece:
And here's a hopeful one that came right before the 2004 election:
And finally, an illustration of what we should have been able to do to stop this at some point:
Creating politically-charged editorial illustration is a challenge-- how can the grey areas and complexities of any issue be addressed in a single image that needs to 'read' quickly? With the Seattle Weekly, I was lucky to be partnered with writer Geov Parrish, who was well-informed, but also wrote to the extreme to get his readers to react. Illustrating his column for a few years, I had the opportunity to engage in this challenge every week, and eventually get more comfortable with it. George Bush was a regular subject in this column, and for all the bad that he spread around, I have to say that I really enjoyed drawing him.
