This protest art under Obama made one artist a right-wing icon

In 2008, artist Jon McNaughton got an idea for a painting called "One Nation Under God." To his surprise, the painting went viral and McNaughton became something of an icon for the political right.

“I spent about six months thinking about it, and I finally said, ‘I’ve got to paint this. I don't care if anybody even has any interest in it. But I'm going to do it,’” McNaughton says. “Then it went viral online amongst some people that were against the painting. At first I thought, ‘Oh, great, this isn't what I want. I'm not an activist.’ Then the tides turned and the support became overwhelming. So, I learned what it felt like to be an activist artist.”

In the painting, Jesus stands at the center holding a copy of the Constitution; surrounding him are past presidents and a group of modern-day Americans from all walks of life.

“It was a very personal painting when I did it,” McNaughton says. “The idea is that I believe that the Constitution was divinely inspired, not that Jesus wrote the Constitution.”

McNaughton didn't expect so much reaction to the painting. He was still selling landscape and religious art, his main work before 2008. “I have to make a living and, honestly, a lot of [my] political paintings don't really make a lot of money, although I have been surprised,” he says.

“One time I did a painting of Obama burning the Constitution,” he recounts. “It was one of those days where I felt, ‘I really want to make a statement, I really want to say how I feel.’ And I didn't have any intention of that painting ending up anywhere, but I painted it. I posted it on Facebook, and it went super viral. It got picked up by Drudge Report and on and on and on and on.”

To make another provocative painting called "Obamanation," McNaughton says he “chose to use an undisclosed studio to focus on the task of embedding in a single painting all the mindless, radical and dangerous atrocities of the Obama administration.”

McNaughton says a common belief exists “among the elite and the establishment that there are certain things that you don't do as an artist. You don't mix politics and religion, for example. But art is meant to create an emotion … and what can create an emotion more than when you mix something that is so agitative to so many people?”

“You look at some of the most famous paintings in history and a lot of them were very connected to politics,” he continues. “Artists like Picasso and Goya were very political … I'm not straying too far away from that, except that I am an anomaly in the art world. Because of my positions and the way I paint, I'm kind of breaking all the rules and really agitating a lot of people.”

Another McNaughton painting, titled "The Forgotten Man," has also gotten a lot of attention. It shows an ordinary guy sitting unhappily on a bench in Washington, DC, with all of the past presidents arrayed behind him. And off to the side, there’s President Barack Obama, with his back turned and his foot on the Constitution.

The phrase the "forgotten man" was popularized by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the Depression, but Donald Trump used it in his victory speech after the November election, as well.

“I think Trump noticed something that was happening during the election,” McNaughton says. “A lot of people who didn't normally come out to vote were responding to his campaign. I've become good friends with [Fox host] Sean Hannity, who buys my paintings, and I've been talking to him about that 'Forgotten Man' painting and how important it was. I felt like it represented this time in history, from our standpoint. We started talking about my painting on his radio show. Trump, in his acceptance speech, mentioned the forgotten man and woman. It's interesting that it all kind of tied together like that.”

This article is based on an interview that aired on PRI’s Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen.