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For these last seven days (hopefully) of TRUMPTRUMP I’m writing about the project. Today: Drawing a narcissist 1/9
Trump is a narcissist so any attention is good to him, even sustained hatred as this project became. As the months of daily drawing went on I started questioning what I was doing and why. 2/9
Two other drawing projects, daily draws of World War I and the Armenian Genocide a century later, were showing me that just documenting the facts through drawing was missing something. In all three projects I looked for ways to balance the history with the human. 3/9
In TRUMPTRUMP, I started trying to concentrate on him less and on what his minions were doing and who was being victimized by them. 4/9
I still drew him and his crew (Trump, however small, is in every drawing), but I tried to resist drawings about whatever nutty thing he tweeted and looked for what his regime was doing. Environmental rollbacks, immigration crimes, weakening of our meager social safety net… 5/9
I also tried, in a halting and inadequate way, to highlight victims. For a week in February 2018 I drew portraits of people deported by ICE. 6/9
Later I drew a week of kids who had been taken for mother parents and in 2019 I drew a whole month of adults and children who had died in ICE custody. These were hard to draw because I was now so used to drawing nastiness that I didn’t know how to draw nice. 7/9
In the later years of the project, if I drew from one of his tweets, it meant that either he did say something germane to wider policies, or that I couldn’t find something that day and took an easy out. 8/9
I’m continuing, even now at the end, to try to look behind the chaff he would send up and draw about what he was enabling and who was being hurt by it. 9/9
