I saturated the canvas in a visceral, uncompromising red, the relentless colour of our political crisis, aiming to evoke a sense of urgency and concern in the audience.
I look at this now, and I don’t just see paint; I see the hot, churning sickness of the current world. I drowned the entire field in this violent, uncompromising red, a colour that is not passion, but pure, high-volume stress—the background noise of perpetual crisis. This red is the currency they trade in.
The Golden Calf is now a beak, enormous and predatory, thrusting out of the frame; it dominates the scene – the embodiment of the Idiot-Savant—a terrifying, golden mechanism of power. Its ambiguity is deliberate: it is both the individual man, Trump, and the machine of lies and exaggeration he commands. I gave it that brassy, deceptive gleam because that’s how the cult of personality works: a thin veneer of wealth covering a gaping void.
And the puppets below? They are the heartbreakers. I didn’t paint them with rage, but with a profound, weary sadness. I tried to capture the pathetic ecstasy in their faces—their little, growing noses seeking to mimic the great one, desperate to belong to the central fiction. They are the willingly manipulated, stripped of their footing, standing in the spotlight of the idol’s own making.
Every coat of paint I laid down felt like I was charting a sickness, a political contagion where devotion to the idiot-savant becomes the only way to feel real. This canvas is my record of how easily we surrender reality for a grand, blinding show.