Isabelle Brourman on painting Donald Trump

A week after a gunman fired a bullet at Donald Trump that grazed his right ear and established him as a kind of mythical folk hero among his supporters, Isabelle Brourman asked to paint him. She had drawn him – seek on him – for over a year, when she attended his trial in New York as a courtroom 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 that. Incredibly, the campaign team agreed to a live portrait session during Olivia Nuzzi's recent interview with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, but with one caveat: “We don't want it to be crazy,” they said. Brourman assured them it wouldn't be. “This,” she told them, “is my Mona Lisa.”

But Brourman is not an artist who deals in standard portraiture—or, for that matter, conventionally flattering portraiture. A trained fine artist, she began attending high-profile trials as a courtroom sketcher in 2022. But it quickly became clear that her work—a combination of pastel, graphite, watercolor, colored pencils, and glitter—was something else. Her many subjects, which include Letitia James, Todd Blanche, and Johnny Depp in addition to Trump, are open and abstracted, their gestures and expressions woven into her depictions. Words and phrases often surround the images. A sketch of Trump's head from the day of the verdict shows his protruding profile, surrounded by the word guilty, over and over again.

The final portrait of the former president – drawn over the course of two days at Mar-a-Lago – now hangs on the wall of Brourman's studio in downtown Brooklyn. The first time she used acrylic paint. The second time, oil. Trump's hands dissolve into willowy brushstrokes, with a misty veil between them. Around his head and chest are the blues, pinks and greens of South Florida. His right ear seems to glow. His eyes are black. At a whopping 3 feet by 4 feet, it's probably crazy.

Ultimately, though, that wasn't a problem for the former president. “Is that a double chin?” he asked after the first sitting. “I look sad,” he said after the second. “And I'm not sad. I'm a happy person.” As she worked, Brourman tried to keep a steady flow of conversation – “it was all the information I could put into the painting,” she says. “Do you draw?” she asked him at one point. He doesn't. “But when I'm in a room,” he added after some thought, “and I see something isn't where it should be, I know I have to move it.” She finally agreed, smiling at him.

Although Brourman attended every day of the former president's civil trial for fraud, as well as the trial of E. Jean Carroll, she wasn't sure Trump would remember her. However, upon her arrival, he made it clear that he did remember her: “He said something like, 'Your hair is usually frizzy.'” In the corner of Trump's salon at Mar-a-Lago, she set up an easel and palette and, as she tells it, became a kitschy embodiment of an artist. “It was really to his advantage,” she says.

Brourman had already made direct contact with Trump's campaign team months earlier. In the middle of the civil trial, at a photo shoot in front of Trump Tower, Brourman happened to meet Susie Wiles, Trump's campaign manager, and told her about the court project, hoping to gain longer-term access to the campaign team. “I drew you the other day,” she told Wiles and showed her the sketch. Brourman emphasized that she was not a traditional sketch artist, which ultimately worked to her advantage. “At Trump, we like to be different,” Wiles told her. The campaign team eventually invited her to draw the Republican National Convention.

During the second session, Trump attended meetings without offering any real explanation as to why Brourman was there. “He said, 'Look how brilliant this brilliant artist is,'” she says. “And they said, What the hell is going on here?“At one point, Matt Gaetz and Stephen Miller stood behind her, marveling at the image. “Interesting,” she heard one of them mutter. In the middle of another meeting, Trump called her over, seemingly out of nowhere. “Did you get any appetizers?” he asked. “Come here, get some shrimp.”

She finally asked to see the ear. “I just got my hair cut,” he smiled. “Nobody's ever had better access.” She stood behind him, very close. With his finger, he traced the trajectory of the bullet across his cheek to the outer edge of his ear. “So I incorporated that into the piece,” she says, which shows a red line down the left side of Trump's face. She sees the assassination as a complete manifestation of Trump's magnetism. “The person he is in the hearts of his most ardent supporters,” she says, “came true in that one moment.” She named the painting after Bob Dylan's famous “It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding).”

Brourman is familiar with cult personality complexes, having herself been the victim of sexual harassment by a Charian former professor at the University of Michigan while in college. “I have a system that allows me to sense things,” she tells me. “When I saw him, I thought, 'Oh, he's got it.'” But as an artist, she has built up a kind of armor, a distance. She processes this through her work. In the portrait, she sees many hidden shapes – Norman Rockwell's private haunts and parts of Vegas and assholes and women. She sees a smile, though not really; everything is redefined in its respective context. “That's what I try to do, and that's what I did in court,” she says. “It's just an interpretation.”