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.” – READ MORE