Posted on 04/25/2006 8:08:39 AM PDT by dead
Bill Clinton has never looked so "hip." This jacket-pulled-back, extended-hip pose of the former president was unveiled last night during a ceremony at the Smithsonian Institution.
In the unconventional creation by artist Nelson Shanks, Clinton bears a passing resemblance to former "Nightline" host Ted Koppel and has a hint of a scowl on his face.
But it was the former president's somewhat unpresidential, somewhat louche stance in the Oval Office that had people talking from Washington to New York...
The painting will hang as part of the newly expanded exhibition "America's Presidents" when the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery opens on July 1 in Washington.
"I have reservations about having a large portrait of me," Clinton said at the unveiling ceremony, where he was joined by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and daughter Chelsea. "If you grew up when I did, portraits were for dead people."
Curator Carolyn Kinder Carr says Clinton appears "intense" and sports a "warm gaze" as if to "greet an unseen visitor."
The other portrait commissioned at the same time features a more-traditional profile of Sen. Clinton striking her best Susan B. Anthony dollar pose.
Sen. Clinton chose Ginny Stanford to paint her portrait - the first time the Portrait Gallery has commissioned that one be painted of the first lady at the same time as the president's.
While many liked Hillary's pose, some of the same people said Bill's "Inside the Beltway" portrait looked very unpresidential.
Carol Baker, 65, a tourist from London, said Clinton's pose looks feminine.
"He looks very effeminate for some reason," she said. "He ought to be wearing a white shirt."
Both paintings were paid for by Clinton's friends.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
HEY! billyblythe! You're NOT hip any longer. Not even the young kids want to know "boxers or briefs" about you aaaaaanymore! Even Monica'd look the other way now.
Get a grip y'old man.
Those are NOT shillery's eyes! THOSE eyes are human!
Preferably well hanged.
That portrait makes him look like death warmed over!
It is lunchtime here.
LOL. I should have known you would be on this one. Do you still have the "leisure suit clinton" pic?
Could you tell if Bubba is wearing his wedding ring in that portrait?
?
This is all that came to mind:
He's wearing the wrong outfit. That pose requires something else:
olé... er... touché. ;)
(It DOES have the bull, tho.)
Too bad nobody told him....
Note how everything about this portrait draws attention to the crotch. The central location on the frame, the red tie, the pointing fingers, the bent-back posture, the jacket pulled back like a theater's curtain. The whole thing is a inside joke by the artist, displaying what he thinks of as being most important about his subject.
Project out the lines from the mantle and the bottom of the fireplace. The horizon line used to construct the perspective runs through at belt height. None of this is accidental.
Then let's look at some of the other props in the room. We have the fireplace poker (Not too subtle there...). We have the massive columns. We even have bushy dark shrubs. Then the rigid linear man is offset by not one but two curvaceous feminine urns, one prominent and one mostly hidden from view...
And the funny thing is, Bill likes it!
From the unveiling.
Well, look at that. Look at what got hung at eye-level. What are the chances?...
delusion
Pronunciation: di-'lü-zh&n, dE-
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, from Late Latin delusion-,
delusio, from deludere
A delusion is commonly defined as a fixed false belief and is used in everyday language to describe a belief that is either false, fanciful or derived from deception. In psychiatry, the definition is necessarily more precise and implies that the belief is pathological (the result of an illness or illness process).
That was my FIRST reaction, too!!!!
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