Existing comment:
Bill Clinton, born 1946
This drawing of President Bill Clinton was created by R. B. Kitaj -- an American artist long resident in England -- as a study for a pastel portrait commissioned by University College, Oxford. Clinton is an honorary fellow of the college, having been a Rhodes Scholar there from 1968 to 1970. Kitaj made multiple sketches of the president during a one-hour sitting at the White House in 1995. The resulting work evokes a long tradition of depicting leaders in profile. Creating a likeness more thought-provoking than blindly complimentary, the artist has written, "I think we remember people by their faces. If you say or hear someone's name, you think the face don't you? . . . I think of the face first, and then other things. . . . I think all painted or drawn faces are more stylized, more abstracted (from life), more realized, and more ambiguous than faces in photographs."
R.B. Kitaj, 1996 |