Revealed: Painter of Official White House Portrait of Bill Clinton Says He Included Monica Lewinsky's Shadow in Portrait, As a Goof

I did not want to write "portrait" twice in one sentence but what are you going to do.

What's done is done. Let's move on.

Aren't we all, in a way, to blame?

Man, that hands-on-hips, hips-bucked-forward is
kind of a giveaway now that it's pointed out

Philadelphia area painter Nelson Shanks cunningly included a shadow over the fireplace cast from a blue dress on a mannequin.

Shanks said painting Clinton was his hardest assignment because "he is probably the most famous liar of all time." So he added the nod to the Lewinsky scandal because it had cast a shadow over Clinton’s presidency.

If you look at the left-hand side of it there’s a mantle in the Oval Office and I put a shadow coming into the painting and it does two things. It actually literally represents a shadow from a blue dress that I had on a mannequin, that I had there while I was painting it, but not when he was there. It is also a bit of a metaphor in that it represents a shadow on the office he held, or on him.

He says Bill and Hillary Clinton are "aware" of the "symbolism" in the painting, and of course hate it.

posted by Ace at 12:47 PM

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