Artist Shepard Fairey, whose iconic HOPE campaign poster of Barack Obama was a global sensation, is back with a new image that both questions and deifies the President.
Appearing on the cover of the Aug. 20 Rolling Stone, the portrait depicts Obama with a brow knit in determination, surrounded by a halo of stars.
"Will he take bold action or compromise too easily?" asks a headline enshrining the President's head.
Fairey said it wasn't meant to be a halo. Rather, the picture he worked from showed Obama standing in front of the presidential seal, he said.
"It's one thing to be running for president and it's another to be President and I think this new illustration that I did hopefully captures the complexity and the weight of his new role," Fairey said.
"Not only will we see how he performs, but also whether we as Americans will now help him and continue to push for the changes we asked for."
The Rolling Stone cover story, appearing on newsstands Friday, examines the issues testing Obama in his first year in office. For more details, go to
http://www.rollingstone.com/.
A guerrilla street artist who has several graffiti arrests, Fairey said his portrait was also inspired by a classically stuffy artwork: Gilbert Stuart's unfinished painting of George Washington, the basis for the engraving on the dollar bill.
Fairey said he was saying both that, like Washington, Obama's barrier-breaking president will be significant, "but also to say the jury still's out on whether this President will live up to his promise."
Like the HOPE poster, which spawned a hundred parodies and homages and which now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, the new Obama image is a study in red, white, blue and black.
It is the antithesis of a striking poster that began popping up this week in downtown Los Angeles depicting Obama as Heath Ledger's Joker, in clownish whiteface with a red slash for a mouth.
"Socialism" declares the poster, which was created by persons unknown and is showing up all over highway pillars and vacant lots - just like Fairey's famous poster.
"I think it's great that someone has the right to express themselves and they took the initiative," he said, "but I don't agree that Obama's taking us into a socialist direction. He's just trying to correct the course.
