Who Are the Presidents in the True Blues Art by Andy Thomas
Andy Thomas paints cowboys, and lots of them. Wyatt Earp, "Wild Pecker" Hickok, the Sundance Kid, not to mention countless nameless cowboys riding broncos, crossing treacherous rivers and playing baseball.
But this November, he'll be looking closely at the winner of the presidential election.
That'south because Thomas' most popular painting is a grouping portrait of viii Republican presidents playing poker, while his next-most pop painting features viii Democratic presidents at a poker table.
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Painted in 2008, the original "Chiliad Old Gang" oil on linen canvas sold at a San Antonio gallery to an unnamed buyer for "well over" the typical $60,000 price of one of Thomas' Western-themed pieces, while two limited-edition runs of signed giclée on canvass prints in different sizes accept sold out and countless prints and notecards take been sold at gift shops and galleries effectually the country. (Particularly in Washington, D.C., where they are a staple of local gift shops.)
The Republican painting features presidents Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan and both Bushes. (Thomas took some heat from an Iowa radio station for leaving out Herbert Hoover.) The Autonomous painting features Andrew Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Carter and Clinton.
Most people buy one or the other, and Thomas jokes that the few who buy both are using one of them for "dart practise."
Subsequently President Obama's inauguration, Thomas revisited the theme for an updated portrait which features Obama joining the grouping for a game of puddle. No matter which side prevails in November, he expects he'll need to do another portrait.
"I'one thousand clearing my slate," he told Time. "I kind of go back and along almost what setting to put them in. … Poker was peachy because the men have to sit down close and you can get the heads a certain size. Pool was a little different considering the tabular array is so large, it's hard to get portrait-sized pictures into the painting. We'll run across."
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A cocky-taught artist, Thomas worked as a graphic designer for an in-firm ad agency for a large manufacturing company for years. Around the time he became section manager in his early 30s, he decided that if he stayed much longer, they'd be paying him too much money for him to always leave, so he quit to pursue his dream of becoming an artist.
For a decade, Thomas painted pretty much anything that might sell, then loaded them into a van and drove with his wife, Dina, to fine art fairs.
"I had this huge variety of artwork," he recalls. "There'd be a still life, a Western, a nude, a send painting, a handbasket of fruit. I merely painted anything I thought would sell."
Andy Thomas' painting, "True Blues," shows Democratic presidents playing poker.
Courtesy of Andy Thomas
That mental attitude carried over as he became more than successful and shifted primarily to Western-themed paintings. When the owner of Somerset Fine Fine art, which sells his prints, suggested a presidential portrait, he was game.
"People are disappointed when they hear that," he said. "They want the artist to have thought of everything. Simply part of creativity is listening to other people's ideas too."
The biggest challenge for Thomas was getting the presidents' faces right. Because he couldn't afford models when he started out, he had learned to paint by making things up, but now he had to paint some of the most recognizable faces in America. He spent hours pouring over photographs—every bit a resident of rural Carthage, Mo., he has never met a president in person—looking for expressions that would fit at a poker game.
"The most challenging was a truly smiling Richard Nixon," he said. "He had his entrada smile, which yous know was kind of a grimace actually, and it was hard to discover a photo where he seems to be truly blithesome, whereas Eisenhower laughed a lot."
Thomas threw a few small touches in the paintings: FDR, the New Dealer, is dealing the cards; Reagan is snacking on jelly beans; Gerald Ford is smoking a pipe and Harry Truman is wearing 1 of his favorite Hawaiian shirts and drinking a Bourbon.
He as well worked difficult to avoid making any statements inadvertently. In an early sketch of "Grand Old Gang," Nixon was holding his cards shut to his chest, but Thomas felt that fabricated him look also paranoid, while he added a tie to an initially tie-less Clinton afterward he seemed too breezy.
Thomas, 58, said reading about the presidents made him start to like all of them as homo beings, although his favorite two politically were Reagan and Clinton. He doesn't have a favorite in the current election on either side, though at that place was one he briefly hoped might join the next painting.
"I'm more of a Rand Paul guy than anything," he said. "But that was not to be."
Source: https://time.com/4226404/andy-thomas-presidents-poker-paintings-prints-posters/
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