The Artist Who Painted Jeffrey Epstein’s Portrait of Bill Clinton in a Dress Tells Us Why She Made It, and What It Means

What is it like for an artist to go viral overnight, and
suddenly find herself part of a political narrative that she has no
control over?

This is the reality for Petrina Ryan-Kleid, whose painting of
Bill Clinton incongruously clad in a blue dress suddenly was
scrutinized across the internet last week after the
Daily Mail
revealed that it had been owned—and prominently displayed—by
Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire convicted pedophile who recently died by
suicide in New York.

Ryan-Kleid says that she has been overwhelmed amid the week’s
frenzy of attention. She spoke to artnet News over the weekend by
email to clarify some misinterpretations circling around the
now-viral image, which she developed as a student, having recently
arrived in the United States from Australia.

“I live a quiet life, and I really just had a naive, newly
arrived foreigner’s idea for a thesis,” she writes of the painting,
known as Parsing Bill, and its companion painting of
George W. Bush playing with blocks and paper airplanes called
War Games. “It was just a silly school artwork that was
supposed to show, pictorially, the messages we are bombarded with
in regards to these presidents.” She confirms that the blue
dress is a reference to Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress, a prominent
piece of evidence in Clinton’s affair with his former intern.

Today, Ryan-Kleid says she actually feels bad about the content
of the painting. “Since I’m Australian, I wasn’t then, nor am I
now, partisan about American politics,” she writes. “At the time,
most of my ideas were fresh from the Daily Show or from
Australian cable TV.”

One thing that seems clear is that the painting of Clinton is
not about making fun of the idea of a man wearing a dress, any more
than her painting of Bush is about making fun of a man playing with
children’s toys. Parsing Bill and War Games
are both about “how opposition parties caricature
presidents,” Ryan-Kleid emphasizes. “Neither painting should
be taken literally.”

Ryan-Kleid got her MFA in 2012 from the New York Academy of Art.
The painting of Clinton was purchased from the 2012 Tribeca Ball, a
fundraiser for the school, though she said that she hadn’t been
aware of who bought it. She believes it sold for about
$1,300.

The New York Academy of Art specializes in traditional
figurative painting, but encourages its students to explore a wide
range of subject matter with those skills. Her pair of paintings of
US presidents is a product of that training.

For the Clinton painting, Ryan-Kleid worked
with Christophe Nayel, a
model who has posed for the New York Academy of Art since 2001.
Nayel, who was vacationing in his native France when the
seven-year-old student painting went viral, recalled that
Ryan-Kleid had been an “absolute joy” to work with, and said that
he, too, had been blown away by the way that the work had
resurfaced.

“I was absolutely stunned to find out that Epstein bought her
painting during a major event at the school,” he told artnet News
in a Facebook message. “Some past students even recognized my legs
in that painting.”

News outlets were able to connect the Clinton image back to
Ryan-Kleid because she had posted it to the Saatchi Art website, which allows
artists to sell prints of artworks directly to consumers. The fact
that it was there, it turns out, is something of a fluke. “I was
trying out that Saatchi site years ago, in 2013, and the only
uploadable photo I had at the time was Bill,” the artist
explains.

Since the explosion of interest in the work, Ryan-Kleid tried
unsuccessfully to have the listing taken down, but the system was
unresponsive (possibly because of the volume of traffic, she
speculated). She estimates that between 100 to 150 people have
bought copies of the print since it went viral. “Saatchi takes most
of the money, but apparently I am owed about $14 per print,” she
says.

Ryan-Kleid adds that she feels uncomfortable about the new
demand for the work, however. She hasn’t yet decided whether she
will keep the money.

The post The Artist Who Painted Jeffrey Epstein’s Portrait
of Bill Clinton in a Dress Tells Us Why She Made It, and What It
Means appeared first on artnet News.