I can’t possibly thank Jeff Sharlet enough for bringing this piece of artwork into my world.
It’s what Jeff calls “fundamentalist kitch,” of which he provides numerous examples and about which has interesting things to say in his most recent blog post.
About the above painting, Jeff says,
Turns out it's by artist Ron DiCianni. I usually don't go in for fundamentalist kitsch — it's more interesting to take it seriously and try to understand what its creators and consumers see in it — but my discovery of a whole site of DiCianni's work fills me with cheap joy.
Jeff says that in a Harper's article soon to be available online he discusses the painting. How could he not?! Once I got past my initial reaction—an admiration of the exquisite walnut frame, the tasteful gold lip, and all that stuff—I couldn’t help but try to decode just what the hell is being communicated in this painting. Is it just, as I first saw it, an innocent yet unintentionally hilarious painting of George Washington and Abe Lincoln praying and laying hands upon another God-fearing wartime President, our own W?
Or is it—more interesting and more sinister—a painting that shows Bush praying with two Presidents under whom the U.S. faced existential threats posed by “intimate enemies”? People (Brits and loyalists on the one hand, and Southerners on the other) who had once been part of our nation and yet had now grown alien to it, and who had to be overcome before our nation could again move forward to fulfill its destiny? In other words, are Abraham Lincoln and George Washington praying with Bush that he will have the faith and wisdom to defeat degenerates like us? If so, that might just be enough to get the painting onto my own wall.
There are other plausible interpretations that began to come to me, but then I saw this painting on the same site selling the Bush/Lincoln/Washington piece:
And then I gave up trying to make any sense whatsoever of what the hell's going on in fundie kitsch paintings.