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Certainly, it would have shaved down both the number of questions the White House press secretary gets about conflicts of interest and the volume of New York Post front pages with his photo splashed across them. It is very easy to imagine a scenario in which Hunter did not write that book and did not publish it so early into his father’s administration. And now some of it, intentionally or otherwise, is showing up in his art, which he recently displayed publicly for the first time. Hunter Biden recounted it all, in his own words and on his own terms, in a memoir released this past spring, less than three months after his father took office.

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Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial centered around whether the then president abused his powers by pressuring the Ukrainian government to dig up dirt on the youngest Biden son to saddle and sideline Joe Biden’s campaign. You can all probably recite his misfortunes and grief and mistakes by heart, because they’ve been relentlessly splashed, publicly lived, and, for the most part, pretty radically addressed by Hunter himself over the last year: There was his board seat at Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company owned by an oligarch mired in charges of corruption, and his investment in a private-equity firm linked to the Chinese government his addiction and his relationships after his divorce from his first wife the alleged stolen laptop that Rudy Giuliani quite literally melted down over. There have been hearings on Capitol Hill, and his name has fluttered out of the White House, coming from its former and current occupants, if in wildly different tones.

He has been examined and scrutinized for what feels like forever, in photos as a grieving child, on television screens with his dad at swearing-in ceremonies, and on tabloid front pages in the throes of his addiction. Hunter sees his work as creating a universal image that can look like something you see under a microscope, or from a satellite millions of light-years away, not unlike the way he himself is watched. It’s like that tension that we need to be as creative and expressive as you possibly can, to pour yourself into it. The gift that they have given me,” he says, referring to the right-wingers obsessed with him, “is their constant pursuit. It’s not therapeutic in the sense that I’m not thinking about it, or that it’s a way to run away from it. “It comes from a kind of innate anxiety that you need to express, and it’s never suppression for me anymore. “Almost all great art, and I’m not saying my art is great, though it’s great to me, comes from tension,” he says, crossing his arms over the work at his feet.

Other times he sprays it or manipulates it by blowing through a straw.Īgainst the concrete floor, next to the president’s son, the painting glows. Sometimes he pours the ink directly on the paper, then uses sponge brushes to mix it around. This makes for hours of repetition, standing over the paper like Jackson Pollock to keep the ink from running and because it gives him a different perspective than if he were to hang something vertically. For this painting, though, he let the ink develop and layered more on top. He could wash it away with more alcohol ink, and then once he was done, he could wash that away too.

He could change the whole thing right now if he wanted to. But he chose the alcohol ink because he can forever manipulate it. He uses alcohol ink-a strange medium, he jokes, for a recovering addict who has publicly documented his struggles with drugs and alcohol, both by choice and because of a near-daily onslaught by his dad’s opponents and the right-wing media. He usually starts by tinkering with the colors, in this case, an almost DayGlo orange and yellow so bright they could exist only in a sunrise at a rave. For the last few days, he’s set his attention on a 26-foot piece of Japanese Yupo paper, a nonabsorbent synthetic that behaves more like a plastic than a paper or a canvas. It’s on the floor of the garage where he spends most hours of most days, hunched over the hundreds of paintings he’s created, leaving his palms and fingernails and jeans and Chelsea boots and the silver bracelets up his wrists stained with blues and reds and yellows and greens. This is where Hunter Biden keeps the light, up here, many minutes up the turns of a hill outside of Los Angeles, behind gates and past Secret Service, through the white, open house he is renting with his wife and young son away from everything and everyone.

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