The artist speaks with Paula Aceves about what it was like to work on a portrait of the former president in his Mar-a-Lago office.
A week after a gunman fired a bullet at Donald Trump, grazing his right ear and cementing him among his supporters as a kind of mythic folk hero, Isabelle Brourman asked to paint him. She’d been drawing him — looking at him — for over a year, attending his trial in New York as a court artist. And he looked different, she thought, after the attempt on his life. “His eyes looked different,” she says. “His expression was different.” She wanted to document it. The campaign, incredibly, agreed to do a live portrait session during Olivia Nuzzi’s recent interview with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, albeit with a caveat: “We don’t want it to be screwy,” they said. Brourman assured them it wouldn’t be. “This,” she told them, “is my Mona Lisa.”
But Brourman is not an artist that deals in standard — or, for that matter, conventionally flattering — portraiture. A trained fine artist, she began attending high-profile trials in 2022 as a courtroom sketch artist. It quickly became apparent, though, that her work — a combination of pastels, graphite, watercolor, colored markers, and glitter — was something different. Her many subjects, which in addition to Trump include Letitia James, Todd Blanche, and Johnny Depp, are frank, abstracted, their gestures and expressions interwoven into their depictions. Words and phrases often surround the images. A sketch of Trump’s head from the day his verdict was read shows his jutting profile surrounded by the word guilty, over and over again.
The final portrait of the former president — drawn over the course of two days in Mar-a-Lago — now rests against the wall of Brourman’s Downtown Brooklyn studio. For the first sitting, she used acrylic paint. For the second, she used oil. Trump’s hands dissolve into willowy brushstrokes, a misty sheet between them.
