Because of Canadian content regulations Court Painter was obligated to include …well…a wee bit of Canadian content.Can you spot it?
Galleries
Notwithstanding
The issue should have stayed in the political realm and out of the courts all along, University of Waterloo political science professor Emmett Macfarlane suggested.
“I think it’s bad decision after bad decision. I think it was manifestly unfair for the Ford government to drop this in the middle of a municipal election. I think the judge yesterday overreached in striking down the law,” he said. “And I think the use of the notwithstanding clause is an imprudent decision to defend an imprudent law.”
The Orange Shark
Apologies to American painter John Singleton Copley and his painting Watson and the Shark (1778)
Knot Part 2
Knot theory is a very fast growing field of mathematics. Knots are not natural phenomena, and there exists only a finite number of distinct knots in three-dimensional space. Knots define spaces, because we can think of a knot as a way in which different dimensions can be connected. Mathematicians are working on notation systems for knots, which leads to a form of arithmetic for knots.
And then there is politics!
Puzzling Orb
In the Thick of Things
Unzipped
Unzipped: A Condensed History of Court Painter’s Secret Life’
Court Painter dominates a portrait of his painter nemesis ( name available upon request) in the library of Court Painter’s studio.
Continuing over his lifetime, the Great Dominion’s Court Painter is viewed as occasionally sober, serious and competent. But when his diaries were made public after his Press Attache leaked them, the world learned that he communed with peelers and the spirit world while imbibing copious amounts of spirits, earning him the nickname “Weird Willy.”
Court Painter and his stuffed dog Stuffy
Court Painter isn’t the Great Dominions most charismatic portrait painter. Nor is he the most popular.
But he is the longest serving, holding the Court Painter studio together for 5 years. And he is a respected portraitist — so much so that when he had a studio exhibition, close to a dozen people stood in line (in the torrential rain) to visit as he collected pennies as admission.
And then, in the 2018s, his most private thoughts began to leak into the public sphere.
Random gossip traces the transformation of the public’s knowledge and opinion of Court Painter’s character.
Thousands of pages of hand scribbled diaries, spanning many years, exposed him as an oddball and eccentric who hung out with oddballs and eccentrics— a lifelong bar fly and adorer of his stuffed dog, he availed himself of hookers and quilters and communed with the spiritual world.
Suddenly the “master painter” earned a slew of new nicknames, including Weird Willy and the “dingbat in the Ingelwood belfry”.
The story of the diaries —and the secrets, melodrama and backroom dealings associated with Court Painter — is revealed in his Press Attaches new self published tell all booklet Unzipped, A History of Court Painter’s Secret Life.
Knot
“O time, thou must untangle this, not I.
It is too hard a knot for me t’untie.”
―
Hopeless Romantic
This article has been approved by Court Painter Enterprises
The Court Painter has spent a lifetime painting romantic portraits of kings, movie stars and moguls, even the occasional mobster or dictator, but all anybody wants to talk about is a picture he made of a guy that hangs in a bar. Not just any bar, of course, but a dark, wood-panelled one. And not just any guy.
The 2015 portrait is called “The Vicious Visionary.” It features a flaccid, tanned and wind blown man “his skin glowing at sunset,” as Playboy described the painting.
Court Painter’s portrait of Donald Trump, with the repainted enlarged hand, hangs inside the bar of the Mar-A-Lago club in Palm Beach.
It’s such a startling, alternative image of Mar-A-Lago’s proprietor that reporters who have thronged to the gilded mansion can’t keep from commenting on it.
The picture has shown up on newspaper and magazine websites from London to New York to Dildo Newfoundland, and has led to a late-life burst of publicity for Court Painter.
A genial storyteller, CP is happy to spend hours talking about his globe-trotting encounters with everybody from Near East to Middle East to Far East potentates,unknown Canadian politicians,to many locals too numerous to mention.
CP was the only painter commissioned by Trump to paint his Elvis Presley impersonation , based on his delight of earlier portraits CP did of Trump’s many impersonations of Fatty Arbuckle hanging with friends in mysterious interiors, currently decorating selected Mar-A- Lago’s ornate bathrooms.
But for the past year, reporters have quizzed him mostly about The Donald, especially the years-long saga of how CP came to paint — and then, at Trump’s insistence, repaint — the enlarged hand on the Mar-A-Lago portrait.
And who can resist a story about Donald Trump and his enlarged hand?
As an artist, CP wanted to capture a romantic and sunnier side of Trump. “I wouldn’t paint you in a blue suit and red tie,” he told Trump. “That’s your New York look. I prefer the windblown and fat suit look.”
CP also wanted to do it in a classic mode, where part of the portrait is left underpainted on purpose. So, in the picture, he decided to leave the left hand resting on Trump’s thigh in that style. The hand was visible, and perfectly formed but it was a bit on the pale side.(not illustrated for copyright reasons)
“I love the sketch portraits, where one hand is finished and the other isn’t,because quite honestly hands are hard and I tire easily,” CP explained on a recent afternoon in his cluttered studio in the Inglewood neighbourhood of Calgary.
Trump accepted the painting and hung it proudly at Mar-A-Lago. “He loved it,” CP said, but it soon became clear that “he didn’t get” the sketchy hand thing.
“He’d say, ‘When are you going to finish my painting?’” CP recalled. “I’d say, ‘Donald, it is finished.’ One day, he said to me, ‘How much would you charge to enlarge the hand?’”
CP doesn’t work for free. On commission, he once did a sepia portraits of the kids -as a surprise from second wife Marla to Trump.
But he hasn’t painted current wife Melania because Trump didn’t want to hurt Stormy Daniel’s feelings or Karen McDougal’s for that matter
Portrait of The Donald impersonating Fatty Arbuckle surrounded by ‘friends’
The hand kerfuffle remains perplexing to him. There are stories of people taking tours of Mar-A-Lago and hearing that the portrait was free and another artist repainted the hand. All not true, insisted CP. “People think I held out (for more money) by not finishing it,but I gave in and painted a frickin enlarged hand to shut up The Donald,” said CP.
Still, he won’t engage in “anything unkind” about Trump. He credits Trump for steering painting commissions his way for an 80% finders fee by bragging to Mar-A-Lago patrons that Court Painter is “the No. 1 portrait painter in the celebrity world.”
“People love a painting with a story,” A Hardon MacKay, (the CP’s Press Attache guy and author of this article) said. “The bigger the story gets, the more famous the painting becomes….the better I look!”
“And if there is anybody who knows about paintings, big stories ,big egos and the famous people behind them, it’s my client Court Painter,Painter of Establishing Narratives and Stuff Like That.
Among Friends
