Michael White was born in Long Island.  When he was little he drew dozens, maybe hundreds of these presidential-themed illustrations. After studying art in college, living in Italy, and moving to Williamsburg in the early 1990s, Michael now lives with his newborn son in a loft in Bushwick.

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Chief Magazine:  Let’s start with these age six drawings.  These are ridiculous.  

Michael White: I think I was trying to be helpful to potential viewers.  They seem to be a compendium of little interests and there are a lot of obsessive little drawings.  Some of these [drawings] verge on the expressionistic.  Like this image of a war, I was probably making explosion sounds while it was being done and everything starts to get chaotic.  I guess I was discovering, or really looking at actual images from the colonial period.  The Signing of the Declaration [of Independence] had receding people, who get faded as they go into the distance, so I guess I was discovering this idea of chiaroscuro.  So this was the real incubation period for a lot of my interest in drawing.  It was all done with a Bic pen on manila paper, which was shrink-wrapped.  My mom would bring home packages of them, I’d rip them open and sit at the dining room table and do these drawings.  It wasn’t the only thing I did but apparently I did it a lot because these are all from the same few months.

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So, are you interested in contemporary politics at all these days?

I am to some degree but no more so than anyone else who wants to see this country to go back to its potential.  I certainly don’t find the same kind of resonance in contemporary imagery of presidents.  I suppose as a child I found it exciting to have books with portraits of Ford and Nixon in them.  Ford was the president at the time.  But it would be hard for me to imagine a very serious portrait of Clinton or either of the Bushes.  There’s some sort of informality about them that seems to resist this kind of iconography.

Well, do you think that comes in part because of the advent of photography?

Photography probably reveals too much now, but it’s also maybe I’m too close to them or maybe I’m just too grown up now.  I don’t know what it is.

[Laughs] The magic has slowly worn off.  You’re getting better with America here.  You’re getting better…

Maybe it’s because I’m trying to include Alaska.  I don’t know.  Yeah, the America imagery is pretty funny.  Some of these presidents… like this one is Garfield.  I knew that there was this one defining event in his presidency and he was assassinated, but other than that there were times when I couldn’t fill in the blanks of what these people were about.  This William Henry Harrison image might’ve been copied from a book; although I guess the peg leg and these people having an exchange was from my imagination.

I also copied their signatures very often, so I think I was trying to reproduce my own book.  I had a book which had facts about them, a portrait, maybe a salient image of their time in office, some image associated with them, and their signature.  I thought “this must be the archetype of a serious book about presidents so I have to include their signatures.”  I didn’t even know script yet but I was copying their signatures, as an abstraction.  I think I set out to do the entire group of presidents but I sort of got tired, I suppose, around number nine or 10.  Then, occasionally after that I would do one… here’s William McKinley, the 25th president; here’s one of Lincoln and one of Grant.

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There are some selected ones but I guess I must have run out of energy or attention when it came to this project; although, I did do a full page of the presidents’ portraits, each one, maybe to compensate.  You can see at the beginning I was very confident in the project and took real pains to make everyone really look they way that they looked.  By the end, they become hilariously hasty.  They look like they’re melting or they’re very non-specific.  I guess it was easier to sort of make Jefferson look like Jefferson.  He had the powdered wig, very period [attire].  By the 20th century, they all have these neckties and they lose the serious 18th and even 19th century air that they seem to have had.

Have you seen the Washington animation by Brad Neely?

No, I haven’t.

Oh, you would really enjoy it... You were a kid with this book, sort of infatuated with this mythology, and now it’s a similar thing… Oswald, who wasn’t the president, but certainly you can’t really say Kennedy without thinking of Oswald.

It’s utterly true and it has occurred to me that that’s the case but at the time I started any of these paintings, these series and these images incorporating Jackie and Oswald, came… I have a few early paintings from the 90’s in which I incorporated maybe just a little incidental bit of photograph of film from Kennedy’s assassination, but not as the main subject of a painting or the prevailing mood of a painting, but just as one bit of the collage-type grouping of many images.  Then I started to hone in on these particular images.  I suppose, also, that my earlier paintings tended to have more elements from different sources, maybe 15, 20 or 12, but it tends to be more like three, four, or five now.

Then it occurred to me after a while that this really is like what I was doing as a child, in terms of there being these political figures, these iconic figures, portraits to some degree.  I think it was also what excited me, not just the portraits of the presidents but these images of what seem to be hyperbolic moments in history of America, like either assassinations, wars or just things that seem to be momentous.  Sometimes the portraits seem to suggest that, or embody that, but often it was these other kinds of events that seemed to draw me in.  It was rarely these mundane things, although it seems like anything presidential was not mundane because it was the president.

Right.  Exactly.  

There’s this one image in here of the president having coffee with another one and I don’t think I copied that from a book.  I think today, this idea of a sort of tumultuously important moment, which used to be expressed in, I suppose, crucifixions and religious imagery, interests me.  I guess these football plays embody that, too, somehow.  This sort of heightened moment of action, the intensity of the present concentrated in one moment.  It’s not as if I necessarily take this so seriously, but people do.  Someone does somewhere.  The culture does by isolating it and presenting it in such a focused way.  Also, this idea of audience is interesting to me.  There are sort of fuzzy audiences in the background of some of these paintings and I feel as if I may pursue that as a subject matter…mostly the audience and just a little bit of what the audience is watching, the participant.

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Even still, there’s a Super Bowl every year and there might be an inauguration every four years, but millions of people tune in to watch the Super Bowl every year, aside from the people who watch games every Sunday so it’s really…

It’s a planetary phenomenon.