Ten years ago this month, I started an insane project that inadvertently launched my art career: I drew portraits of every U.S. vice president with an octopus on his head.
The series started as a giddy, over-caffeinated idea that I took way too far. In July 2013, shortly after getting laid off from a grueling corporate job, a friend invited me to participate in the From Dusk til Drawn fundraiser at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Santa Barbara. Basically, it involved drawing for 24 straight hours. At that point in my life – i.e. before children – sleep deprivation was a novelty. It sounded insane. I was in.
The artist at work.
The last thing I wanted was to be struggling to think of ideas of something to draw in the middle of the night. I needed to do a series, I thought. So after some debate, I decided to do portraits of all 47 vice presidents of the United States. Why? I don’t know.
I’ve always been quietly obsessed with the vice presidency. It is, after all, the fifth wheel of the Executive Branch. The constitution has little to say about the actual duties of the veep aside from presiding over the Senate and wondering about the president’s health. The wording of the Constitution was so vague that when William Henry Harrison died of pneumonia after a lengthy and ill-advised inaugural speech, it wasn’t immediately clear that his veep, John Tyler, would ascend to the presidency or serve under the title of “acting president.” The ambiguity wasn’t cleared up until 1967 with the ratification of the 25th Amendment.
Vice presidents were all ambitious men who could see the pinnacle of power but, save for a few, never quite got there. Instead, for much of American history, they were political afterthoughts -- ignored and forgotten. Woodrow Wilson’s wife and close advisors kept Thomas Marshall in the dark for 18 months about the president’s incapacitating stroke, thus denying him the presidency. FDR only met with Truman once before he died in the middle of WWII. And LBJ so relentlessly teased Hubert Humphrey during cabinet meetings that the veep reportedly broke down and cried. No wonder then that John Nance Garner, FDR’s first VP, said that the job wasn’t worth a “warm bucket of piss.”
That night I ended up drawing 23 of the (then) 46 vice presidents. I hadn’t really drawn much since high school. Those first drawings were rough. When I got back home in Los Angeles, I vowed to complete the set. But then a funny thing happened: my drawing skills improved. My Truman was way better than my John Adams. I realized that I would need to redraw everything. And then when I got to Truman again, I realized I had to redraw all of them one more time. A few I had to redraw even more times. I never could get Al Gore right so I just put a tentacle over his face.
At that point, I decided to launch an Etsy store. To my surprise, people seemed to like my weird project. My work was featured on sites like Boing Boing, Buzzfeed, and The New York Times. That eventually led to me successfully funding a Kickstarter to make a Veeptopus Book.
It’s been a long crazy decade. I don’t really do octopuses anymore but you can buy the Veeptopus book, prints, and even a limited-edition poster.
