{"id":7924,"date":"2018-08-26T00:50:45","date_gmt":"2018-08-26T00:50:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/allanhardingmackay.ca\/courtpainter\/?p=7924"},"modified":"2018-08-26T01:04:48","modified_gmt":"2018-08-26T01:04:48","slug":"hopeless-romantic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/allanhardingmackay.ca\/courtpainter\/?p=7924","title":{"rendered":"Hopeless Romantic"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This article has been approved by Court \u00a0Painter Enterprises<\/em><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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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.<\/p>\n

The 2015 portrait is called \u201cThe Vicious Visionary.\u201d It features a flaccid, tanned and wind blown\u00a0man \u201chis skin glowing at sunset,\u201d as Playboy\u00a0described the painting.<\/p>\n

\"\"\u00a0Court Painter’s portrait of Donald Trump, with the repainted enlarged hand, hangs inside the bar of the Mar-A-Lago club in Palm Beach.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It\u2019s such a startling, alternative image of Mar-A-Lago\u2019s proprietor that reporters who have thronged to the gilded mansion\u00a0 can\u2019t keep from commenting on it.<\/p>\n

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 \u00a0Court Painter.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u00a0CP was the only painter commissioned by Trump to paint his Elvis Presley impersonation , based on his delight of \u00a0earlier 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.<\/p>\n

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But for the past year, reporters have quizzed him mostly about The Donald, especially the years-long saga of how CP \u00a0came to paint \u2014 and then, at Trump\u2019s insistence, repaint \u2014 the enlarged hand on the Mar-A-Lago portrait.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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And who can resist a story about Donald Trump and his enlarged hand?<\/p>\n

As an artist, CP wanted to capture a romantic and sunnier side of Trump. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t paint you in a blue suit and red tie,\u201d he told Trump. \u201cThat\u2019s your New York look. I prefer the windblown and fat suit look.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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)<\/p>\n

\u201cI love the sketch portraits, where one hand is finished and the other isn\u2019t,because quite honestly hands are hard and I tire easily,\u201d CP explained on a recent afternoon in his cluttered studio in the Inglewood\u00a0neighbourhood of Calgary.<\/p>\n

Trump accepted the painting and hung it proudly at Mar-A-Lago. \u201cHe loved it,\u201d CP said, but it soon became clear that \u201che didn\u2019t get\u201d the sketchy hand thing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cHe\u2019d say, \u2018When are you going to finish my painting?\u2019\u201d CP recalled. \u201cI\u2019d say, \u2018Donald, it is finished.\u2019 One day, he said to me, \u2018How much would you charge to enlarge the hand?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

CP doesn\u2019t work for free. On commission, he once did a sepia portraits of the kids -as a surprise from second wife Marla to Trump.<\/p>\n

But he hasn\u2019t painted current wife Melania \u00a0because Trump didn’t want to hurt Stormy Daniel’s feelings or Karen McDougal’s for that matter<\/p>\n

\"\"Portrait of The Donald impersonating Fatty \u00a0Arbuckle surrounded by ‘friends’<\/em><\/p>\n

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. \u201cPeople 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,\u201d said CP.<\/p>\n

Still, he won\u2019t engage in \u201canything unkind\u201d 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 \u00a0is \u201cthe No. 1 portrait painter in the celebrity world.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u201cPeople love a painting with a story,\u201d A Hardon \u00a0MacKay, (the CP’s Press Attache guy and author of this article) said. \u201cThe bigger the story gets, the more famous the painting becomes….the better I look!\u201d<\/p>\n

“And if there is anybody who knows about paintings, big stories ,big egos and the famous people behind them, it\u2019s my client Court Painter,Painter of Establishing Narratives and Stuff Like That.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This article has been approved by Court \u00a0Painter 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, … Continue reading “Hopeless Romantic”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"gallery","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7924","post","type-post","status-publish","format-gallery","hentry","category-images","post_format-post-format-gallery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/allanhardingmackay.ca\/courtpainter\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7924","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/allanhardingmackay.ca\/courtpainter\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/allanhardingmackay.ca\/courtpainter\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/allanhardingmackay.ca\/courtpainter\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/allanhardingmackay.ca\/courtpainter\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7924"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/allanhardingmackay.ca\/courtpainter\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7924\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12480,"href":"https:\/\/allanhardingmackay.ca\/courtpainter\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7924\/revisions\/12480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/allanhardingmackay.ca\/courtpainter\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/allanhardingmackay.ca\/courtpainter\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/allanhardingmackay.ca\/courtpainter\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}