Painting Donald Trump
A week after a gunman fired a bullet at Donald Trump, grazing his right ear and cementing him among his supporters as a kind of mythic folk hero, Isabelle Brourman asked to paint him. She’d been drawing him — looking at him — for over a year, attending his trial in New York as a court artist. And he looked different, she thought, after the attempt on his life. “His eyes looked different,” she says. “His expression was different.” She wanted to document it. The campaign, incredibly, agreed to do a live portrait session during Olivia Nuzzi’s recent interview with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, albeit with a caveat: “We don’t want it to be screwy,” they said. Brourman assured them it wouldn’t be. “This,” she told them, “is my Mona Lisa.”
But Brourman is not an artist that deals in standard — or, for that matter, conventionally flattering — portraiture. A trained fine artist, she began attending high-profile trials in 2022 as a courtroom sketch artist. It quickly became apparent, though, that her work — a combination of pastels, graphite, watercolor, colored markers, and glitter — was something different. Her many subjects, which in addition to Trump include Letitia James, Todd Blanche, and Johnny Depp, are frank, abstracted, their gestures and expressions interwoven into their depictions. Words and phrases often surround the images. A sketch of Trump’s head from the day his verdict was read shows his jutting profile surrounded by the word guilty, over and over again.
The final portrait of the former president — drawn over the course of two days in Mar-a-Lago — now rests against the wall of Brourman’s Downtown Brooklyn studio. For the first sitting, she used acrylic paint. For the second, she used oil. Trump’s hands dissolve into willowy brushstrokes, a misty sheet between them. Surrounding his head and across his chest are the blues and pinks and greens of South Florida. His right ear seems to glow. His eyes are black. A lofty 3 by 4 feet, it is, arguably, screwy.
In the end, though, that was not a concern of the former president. “Is that a double chin?” he asked, after the first sitting. “I look sad,” he said, after the second. “And I’m not sad. I’m a happy guy.” While she worked, Brourman tried to keep a steady flow of conversation — “it was all information that I could put into the painting,” she says. “Do you draw?” she asked him at one point. He does not. “But if I’m in a room,” he added, after some thought, “and I see something’s not where it should be, I know to move it.” She eventually agreed to give him a smile.
Despite the fact that Brourman had attended every day of the former president’s civil fraud trial, as well as the E. Jean Carroll trial, she wasn’t sure if Trump would remember her. He made clear upon her arrival, though, that he did: “He was like, ‘Your hair is usually frizzy.’” In the corner of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago parlor, she arranged an easel and a palette, becoming, in her telling, a campy embodiment of an artist. “It was really for his benefit,” she says.
Brourman first made direct contact with the Trump campaign months earlier. Midway through the civil trial, while on a photo shoot outside of Trump Tower, Brourman bumped into Susie Wiles, Trump’s campaign manager, and told her about the court project, hoping to gain longer term access to the campaign. “I drew you the other day,” she told Wiles, showing her the sketch. Brourman stressed that she wasn’t a traditional sketch artist, which, in the end, worked in her favor. “At Trump, we like different,” Wiles told her. The campaign eventually invited her to draw the Republican National Convention.
Throughout the second sitting, Trump took meetings without giving a real explanation as to why Brourman was there. “He was like, ‘Look how brilliant, this brilliant artist,’” she says. “And they were like, What the fuck is going on?” At one point, Matt Gaetz and Stephen Miller stood behind her, puzzling over the picture. “Interesting,” she heard one of them murmur. Midway through another meeting, Trump called her over, seemingly out of nowhere. “Did you get any hor d’oeuvres?” he asked. “Come here, get some shrimp.”
She asked, eventually, to see the ear. “I just got a haircut,” he smiled. “This is the best access anyone’s ever gotten.” She stood behind him, up close. With his finger, he traced the trajectory of the bullet across his cheek to the outer edge of his ear. “So I went and added that into the work,” she says, which shows a slash of red on the left side of Trump’s face. She sees, in the assassination attempt, a full manifestation of Trump’s appeal. “The person he is in the hearts of his most fervent believers,,” she says, “it came true in that one moment.” She named the painting after Bob Dylan’s famous “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).”
Brourman is familiar with cult personality complexes, herself a victim of sexual assault by a charimatic former University of Michigan professor, while she was an undergrad. “I have a system in place where I can sense things,” she tells me. “When I saw him, I was like, ‘Oh, he has it.” But, as an artist, she’s built up an armor, a distance. She processes through her work. In the portrait, she sees many hidden shapes — the private haunts of Norman Rockwell, and bits of Vegas, and tramp stamps, and women. She sees a smile, though not really; it’s all redefined, in its particular context. “That’s what I’m trying to do, and that’s what I did in court,” she says. “It’s just an interpretation.”