"OF MICE AND MAN..." an Exhibition of ink drawings

I was inspired to start depicting George Bush last year on my way to a one-month residency in Vermont. The September 11th disaster was still fresh in my mind and I was about to spend some serious time alone drawing and creating. I wasn't exactly sure what I wanted to create during this time; my approach to making art is often like this, open to the slightest distraction or influence from my environment. I had created two drawings immediately after September 11th that focused on the World Trade Center, as I had lost a fireman friend, Eric Allen, in its destruction and could not forget the day that my wife Vicky had been working in that building when it was bombed in 1993 and how she was sick from smoke inhalation for a week after. These drawings were formatted as tall vertical panels and part of my plan was to further explore working a variety of images into this format.

On the way to Vermont I stopped at a convenience store and noticed a kind of commemorative mirror hanging up that basically had a high contrast graphic image of a furrowed and concerned looking George Bush silk-screened onto its surface. My reaction was to consider this depiction of George Bush and how presidents are typically depicted or have been in the past. I couldn't think of another president who had ever been innnortalized as sad. As an artist who is always interested in symbols and in particular what I like to think of as the "birth" of symbols, this struck me as something new: Sadness as a symbol of leadership.

Upon settling in to my studio in Vermont I tried to depict George Bush as I had seen him in that store, from memory. It didn't work out too well and the image looked more like a self-portrait! I felt discouraged and put that drawing aside and moved on to other work for the rest of my residency. Then this past spring the idea finally wound its way back into the front of my brain and I began to collect photographic images of G.W. from magazines and creating ink renderings directly from them. I tried to blend this concept of sadness, which I truly believe we all felt, with a healthy dose of questioning and criticism, but I couldn't help seeing that a bit of self-portraiture was slipping in!

In the end my hope is that viewers can look at these drawings and decide for themselves whether our president is taking the desired road. I believe that things change daily and all of our actions influence how events unfold. We all make life decisions and form opinions based on the huge visual and information input that we experience in the world, whether we like it or not. These ink drawings jump into the mix and try to be suggestive; hopefully they might suggest things that have yet to be considered.

Kenny Cole

"Wiseman" 2002
Ink on paper, with plastic
30" x 22"