Wednesday Stupid

Jon McNaughton's new lithograph, "Crossing the Swamp", modeled on Emanuel Leutze's "Crossing the Delaware", 1851. After setting the Capitol on fire (you can see the flames illuminating the building's interior clear up into the Rotunda dome), the Emperor and his comrades make their escape across an unexpected bog surrounded by dead hemlocks. Mattis, Carson (face turned to the burning halls of Congress), Huckabee-Sanders, and Kelly in the stern ply the oars, while Conway, Bolton (looking as if he wandered in from a duck hunt) and Two-Gun Sessions in the foreground keep their guns at the ready in case Kelly tries to make a break; Pompeo lower his binoculars, slowly, as if he'd just spotted something truly alarming. The Emperor, possibly drugged to keep him calm, stares at the haunting though ineffectual fire of his hurricane lamp, Mrs. Trump grasps Pence around the loins while he performs an unspeakable act with a flag, and Ivanka Trump looks on in horror. In the bow, Ambassador Haley tries to prod an intruding alligator out of the way (or is she spearing it?), thrusting her leg out as if making ready to leap out and wrestle the beast. Jared and Junior have perhaps already been locked up. The moon is a ghostly galleon, but aren't they all?

Forgotten but not gone

Click to embiggen for the full effect.

Don't think everybody's heard about this yet: Utah-based fine artist Jon McNaughton's new oil, returning to the composition of his 2016 painting The Forgotten Man in a piece entitled You Are Not Forgotten, in which his clear allegorical style has given way to something more strange and fanciful, even surrealistic. Below the same park bench in front of the White House where the forgotten man sat in despair in the earlier work, the dirt has been paved over with little stones, between which a tiny plant has unexpectedly bloomed (like the pilgrim's staff in the opera), and the forgotten man is starting to dig it out with his trusty trowel, presumably planning to take this federal parks property home, while a woman and girl watch, solemnly—the woman holding a Kool-Aid pitcher of water ready to pour onto the back of his neck, or perhaps into his hood, in case he gets overheated. At his left, a very slender but slightly stooped President Trump in his characteristic red tie stands where President Obama trampled the Constitution underfoot in the first painting, hand outstretched in an Ecce Homo gesture pointing the formerly forgotten man out to his diverse audience of mostly veteran and serving members of the military (I can't recognize any of them by name, other than maybe Pence just behind his right shoulder), just in case they haven't remembered him yet. A serpent (the don't-tread-on-me snake of the Revolutionary War?) is biting him in the ankle, and his right hand has miraculously grown to twice the size of his left.

The original Forgotten Man.