President George W. Bush once told a group of visitors over lunch that he had an advantage over Winston Churchill. “I believe in God,” the president said, referring to the famous agnosticism of Britain’s leader in World War II.
I found myself thinking of that remark with Bush’s debut as an artist, with portraits of leading figures — including a piercing painting of President Vladimir Putin. It sent me to fetch one of my most treasured books, a short primer penned by Churchill called “Painting as a Pastime.”
In it, Churchill outlines his plans for when he gets to heaven. But first he opens with a little essay on “the avoidance of worry.” He writes of cabinet making, chemistry, bookbinding and even bricklaying. It was painting, he writes, that, during a low spot in his life, “came to my rescue.”
Churchill warns the newcomer that real artists attain their abilities by “long, hard, persevering apprenticeship.” He was talking about something less ambitious. “We cannot aspire to masterpieces,” he writes. “We may content ourselves with a joy ride in a paint box.” What a wonderful phrase.
And what wonderful advice for the artist known as “W.” Churchill confesses that he turned to painting in circumstances that one can imagine were similar to those that beset President Bush on his return to Texas. After five years as governor and eight as president, he was suddenly at loose ends.
This happened to Churchill in May 1915, when he was out as First Lord of the Admiralty after the disaster of Gallipoli. He was still in the Cabinet but without authority, so that he “knew everything and could do nothing.” Writes Churchill: “The change from the intense executive activities of each day’s work at the Admiralty to the narrowly measured duties of a counselor left me gasping.”
Churchill compares himself to a “sea beast fished up from the depths.” While he was “inflamed to action,” Churchill writes, he was “forced to remain a spectator of the tragedy, placed cruelly in a front-row seat.” Then, one day, he picked up a child’s paint box.
Next Churchill went out and bought a full set of oils, brushes, and canvas. He did much of his painting at his country home, known as Chartwell. He writes of how painting changed the way he sees — and fit right in with his temperament.
“In all battles two things are usually required of the commander-in-chief: to make a good plan for his army and, secondly, to keep a strong reserve,” he writes. “Both these are also obligatory upon the painter.”
President Bush tends — to judge by the paintings he has shown so far — to focus on people, whether himself in a shower or portraits of his fellow statesmen. His canvases include Tony Blair of Britain and John Howard of Australia. He has an uncanny ability to capture a likeness.
Churchill focused on landscapes. He writes of falling in with a group of painters in southern France. “I cannot pretend to feel impartial about the colors,” he says at one point. “I rejoice with the brilliant ones.”
Churchill may have been famously agnostic, but in “Painting as a Pastime,” he’s not ambiguous about his plans for eternity. “When I get to heaven, I mean to spend a considerable portion of my first million years in painting, and so get to the bottom of the subject.”
He predicts he would require a “gayer palette than I get here below.” His palette’s dullest colors, he ventures, would be “orange and vermillion” and “beyond them will be a whole range of wonderful new colors which will delight the celestial eye.”
This is what painting does to people. It is liberating; it opens up their minds to all sorts of visions and ideas. Churchill hasn’t yet — at least insofar as we’re aware — been put on canvas by President Bush. But there’s no rush. He has a long and joyful passage ahead as a painter.
All the greater the fun to think that whenever the 43rd president does get to Heaven, he could well end up unfolding his easel on the same cloud as the founder of what might be called the Chartwell School. Then the two of them can take their joyride in a paint box to new heights.