Anne Nordhaus-Bike
My interest in creating a series on the U.S. presidents was sparked by the presidential election of 1996 and by a book my husband had published that same year on the Streets of the Near West Side. Many of the streets in this Little Italy area of Chicago are named for U.S. presidents, most notably Taylor Street, which honors Zachary Taylor. The series began with Taylor, after which my efforts turned to America’s beginning by painting George Washington and the other early presidents and then working forward in historical time. Then came the presidents after Taylor. The portraits were created over a period of about two years.
The paintings made their public debut with Presidential Presence, an exhibit of the entire series at Burkhart Studios in Chicago that opened in February 2000 in observance of Presidents’ Day; a local television station aired a special feature on the show on Presidents’ Day of that year. Selections from the series also appeared in three other shows in the Chicago area that year.
The series presents every American president up to and including Bill Clinton, who was president during the project’s conception and creation. After the 1990s, my artistic interests moved in other directions, so no additional portraits have been created to feature the citizens who have held office since Clinton’s administration.
A word about materials
All the portraits were painted on a special paper that is made by hand in Japan from the wood of the mulberry. The result is a translucent sheet of paper that is exquisitely soft to the touch and has a soft deckle edge. The sheets were hand-torn into smaller pieces in preparation for painting in order to give each an uneven, deck-like edge on all sides. For the presidents, a sepia-toned paper was used to recall old photos and the blurring effects of time.
The portraits were mounted in museum-quality white mats, each with identical outer dimensions. Because the paper used for the portraits was torn by hand, the dimensions of the paintings varied slightly, so the openings cut into the centers of the mats were cut in a variety of slightly varying sizes to accommodate the portraits perfectly. Also, the mat openings were cut slightly larger than the portraits in order to display the entire piece of paper used for each painting, including the deckle formed by the torn edges.
After considering various framing options, we chose standard 8 X 10 wooden frames both to minimize costs and because their plain appearance would combine harmoniously with the paintings without competing with the art. My husband, a lifelong Democrat, suggested a visual acknowledgment of the country’s political partisanship and polarity by using white frames for Democratic presidents and black ones for Republicans.
Please click here for complete Presidential Presence Gallery.
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