I painted the Prime Minister

I am writing this using voice transcription software because at the moment I'm slowly pacing about the house, carrying a two-week-ish old infant around the lounge room, because if I stop for more than about 30 seconds she'll realize I'm not her mother and I'm of no use to her because I don't have mammary glands and she'll start crying so please bear with me – it might be a little bit disjointed.

In the previous newsletter I talked about my "dopamine detox" (a nonsense name for something you can't actually do, and yet it was quite helpful) and about how it had enabled me to do a painting and... yeah.

This is the painting.

I even did a TikTok, which you should not watch if you are on your own dopamine detox or have a weak stomach:

For more information about why I would do such a thing I'm going to leave a Q&A that I did with David Farrier on a paid edition of his Webworm newsletter.

I think it's fairly comprehensive and should answer any of the questions that you might have had and possibly even more.

Other questions are being answered at the TradeMe auction that I am currently running for this "artwork".

I suppose the connection to self-improvement isn't all that tenuous because without intentionally avoiding aimless scrolling for a couple of weeks I can honestly say that this painting wouldn't exist.

Whether that is a net good or a net bad is kind of up for discussion but I think it's probably a positive, because a big part of the reason I started this newsletter experiment was to see if I could find space in my life to get more art done. A lot of that space was to be carved out at the time that I spent aimlessly reading news websites and scrolling social media, and as unlikely as it may seem, this hideous painting feels like a very real triumph on my self-improvement journey.

So with that I will cut to the Q&A which – given our audience overlap you may have already read on Webworm – and I'll ask gently that if you have any questions to ask me of this painting that you leave them up on the TradeMe auction as the Q&A is really where the actual art occurs, given the artistic value of the painting itself is... well, let's say, questionable.

As always thanks for reading – do look forward to my next voice-recognition-penned diatribe whenever I can capture enough sleep to have the mental faculties to actually write one.

A Q&A with David Farrier & Joshua Drummond

Dear God, what is this abomination? Please explain what is going on in your mind - why are you doing this?

Man, I’m not entirely sure what it is or why I’m doing it. I guess there’s a bit of a backstory. Part of it is that most of what I paint is cute stuff, self-conscious kitsch, like birds wearing hats or landscapes from video games. 

A few years back I decided I wanted to see if I could learn to paint photo-realistically. It worked, kind of - I ended up spending a bit more than five years working sporadically on a painting of our cat that was meant to be a birthday present for my wife and I only finished shortly before she died. (The cat, not my wife.) 

After I finished the painting I decided I never wanted to do any genuinely photorealistic stuff ever again, as it’s too fiddly and time-consuming, but I was able to use the skills I’d picked up to do a decent painting of a Bored Ape as payment for a mate who’d helped me out with my parody NFT project, the Bird Hat Grift Club. 

I ended up taking a similar approach with this portrait of the Prime Minister - realistic enough, but not so you’d mistake it for an actual photo.

The other part of the story is that I’ve done this a couple of times before, that is, painted portraits of people I don't have a high opinion of and sold them on TradeMe.

Dislike can take up a lot of mental space, and I’ve written quite prolifically of the agony of having no real ability to change what is quite clearly — as in scientifically, objectively — wrong with the world.

I guess painting is a way of processing this. 

The people I’ve painted so far have either been prominent mainly because they’re so objectionable (like Michael Laws) or have been gifted lead roles in making New Zealand a significantly worse place (like Christopher Luxon.)

And I guess I’m just kind of fascinated by politicians of all stripes; the way that they have to sacrifice their humanity to gain and maintain power. Especially with Luxon, you end up with this caricature who speaks entirely in trite slogans and gormless cliches and never seems to respond sincerely to questioning.

I find this so weird and objectionable — people always talk about how politicians should be “someone you’d like to have a beer with” but if someone showed up at my house talking in the fundamentally Martian patois that top politicians adopt I’d kick them out.

Another thing is that I don’t have a very high regard for my actual artistic skills, and I think contemporary art is mainly a grift that enables the ultra-rich to either appear learned and magnanimous or just indulge in money-laundering.

This limits my chances for a career in the contemporary art world. I’m fine with that, art is very much a part-time gig for me, but what I do consider myself good at is TradeMe auctions. The real art isn’t the painting, it’s the auction and the Q&A that arises. That's where I have the most fun, anyway.

I guess the last part of the reason I did this is I just find it so completely absurd, to the point that I kept cracking up while working on some detail of the painting.

I’m very aware that it’s quite a strange thing to do.

And that might stem from the fact that I’m very sleep-deprived, as our daughter was born just a few weeks ago, and I’ve got my son crawling around on my lap as I write this.

It all adds up to create an interesting mental space.

What gear did you use? How did you paint this? How long did it take?

It’s acrylic paint on canvas. I used the biggest, cheapest canvas I had: it’s a metre tall. I’ve had it for over a decade. I don’t know where I got it, and I could never think of the right painting to put on it, and as I moved houses and such it just kind of came with me getting more and more decrepit.

It was covered in spiderwebs and cat hair and dead insects, so I decided it’d be the perfect substrate for a portrait of the Prime Minister. I used acrylic paint because I’m familiar with it, even though it’s probably not the ideal medium for a painting like this.

The best thing about acrylic is that it dries very quickly. The worst thing is that it dries very quickly, so you have to be sitting at the easel with a little spray mister thing to keep the surface moist if you want to blend paint on the canvas.

Occasionally, if you want to make a quick blend or correction, it makes sense to lick your finger and smudge the canvas, which is why the auction (truthfully) describes the painting as being 0.1 percent body fluids. It’s interesting to think there's some of my actual DNA in it, and that some of the painting is probably in me.

I hope it’s not too toxic.

Oh and it took about a bit over a month to paint, maybe 30 hours total?

Maybe a weird question, but did you listen to any music or podcasts while painting it?

Yes. This is going to sound like the biggest suck-up ever but I did listen to Flightless Bird while I made it — the “Navy Dolphins” and “OnlyFans” episodes. I also listened to Behind the Bastards; I’m a big fan of that pod and they had a weirdly appropriate two-parter about the “evilest painter,” Thomas Kinkaide.

I also listened to an audiobook of The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, a book I reviewed for The Spinoff. My friends and I exchanged a lot of rambling voice messages.

And there was a good mix of music. The soundtrack to the 2016 Doom game, a bunch of shoegaze instrumental rock like Mogwai and Maybeshewill and Godspeed You Black Emperor, a band called Berlinist, the album Typhoons by Royal Blood, some Radiohead and Low Roar, and in the end phases of the painting I got really into Incubus again for some reason.

I am looking at this painting and my brain does not want to process it. Please tell me, as the artist, what is going on here?

You know that internet gag where someone sees something awful that leads them to comment “what a terrible day to have eyes?”

That’s what I’m going for.

If your brain doesn’t want to process it then it’s working. I love that sort of thing. For an example, I really like Henrietta Harris’ work — she renders people (and cats!) in this rich illustrative style but with multiple eyes or noses or distortions in the picture that make it quite genuinely difficult to tell what's going on and the overall effect is enjoyably disturbing.

For the Luxon portrait, I could tell it was doing what I wanted it to when I took a friend down to my basement studio without hinting at what I was working on and she screamed when she saw it.

It was very important that Luxon look as much like Luxon as possible, while his ...environment looked as surreal and disturbing as possible.

Also I should clear something up.

A bunch of people who’ve seen the painting seem to think it’s a butthole. It’s not a butthole.

If your butt looks like that, seek help urgently. It’s just meant to represent flesh, something between elbow skin and a throat and an areola and a boil and varicose veins. Human skin is weirder the more you think about it, right? We’re just naked flesh covering pulsating veins topped with a knob of hair, if we’re lucky. (I'm not, and neither is Luxon.)

Originally, the painting was meant to be Luxon’s eyes and nose and mouth in the centre of the picture with the rest of his face stretched across the canvas a bit like the Last Human from Doctor Who, but I didn’t have the artistic skill to pull that off. Then I had the idea of making it look a bit like Jim Carrey emerging from the robot rhino in Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, except with Luxon kind of joined to whatever he’s emerging from, like the uvula at the back of your throat.

And I wanted him to look very happy to be there, just thrilled off his nut, but also with a kind of grimacing grin like Hide The Pain Harold or the old Flight Centre captain a few seconds before the ad ended. Because I based the portrait on what I think was Luxon’s LinkedIn profile picture, it mostly works.

Do you want Luxon to see this, and if so what do you want him to take from it?

Sure. There’s a good chance he sees it, but if he’s anything like my previous subjects he’ll refuse to comment.

On the other hand, it’s 2024, shame is the new fame, he’s got a social media team, and there’s every chance he tries to make some kind of hay out of it. While I hate to break the character I’ve put together for the auction, I’d like to get ahead of any attempt to leverage this. What I want him to take from it, and what he absolutely will not, is: people see through you.

And he — and you — should be a bit horrified by this, actually. 

For me, what’s creepy about this painting isn’t Luxon’s sweaty, grinning face; it’s what’s implied to be behind it. Of course the painting is meant to be gross and funny but, if you’re looking, it’s also meant to be frightening, because it’s representative of the insane situation the country and the world are in.

Behind that grinning mask, that millimetre or less of paint, is a howling vortex of anthropogenic anti-reality bearing down on us to devour all possibility of a decent future. If you saw the mini-series Chernobyl, that show had the perfect metaphor: the gaping maw of an open reactor; the cost of lies.

We’ve put all this carbon in the atmosphere, incurring a debt to the laws of thermodynamics, and physics is coming to count the cost. And Luxon and his ilk are — somehow — pretending that we don’t need to do anything meaningful about this; instead we need to do all the things that led to the problem, like neoliberal economics and fossil fuel production, harder and faster and more cheerfully. I find that inhuman, and terrifying, and so should you. 

Ideally, Luxon would too. 

But he won’t. 

Just to be clear again, where is the money for this auction going?

It’s currently up for auction with half of the proceeds split between Rainbow Youth and Kiwipal, the Kiwi Trust for Palestinian Children’s Relief.

As an evangelical Christian, I’m sure Luxon will be enthused about both those causes. The other half will be going to a cause I like to call “buying food for my children.”

Is there anything else you’d like to add? This is your time to shine.

I am very tired. Part of this is the new baby in the house and part of it is that I clearly have too many hobbies. You can purchase my artwork here.

I have two newsletters: one about self improvement, and one about media and politics that I find too depressing to update.

I write other stuff too. For a completely different product of dwelling on dislike: if you don’t enjoy the heel turn JK Rowling has taken, read my Harry Potter fanfic. What a great way to close out this Q&A!