Brian Bolduc in NRO:
Hanging in Andrew Breitbart’s living room is an eight-foot-tall portrait of Abraham Lincoln. The president’s visage — an expressionistic swirl of broad brushstrokes and bright colors — earns the admiration of everyone who sees it, Breitbart notes on the back cover of Ronald Reagan and the American Ideal, a book of paintings by the portrait’s artist, Steve Penley. Yet the muckraker saves his highest compliment for the painter himself. “Penley is one of those patriots who is heeding his country’s call,” Breitbart writes — the call to defend American exceptionalism.
It’s a weighty charge for the 47-year-old artist from Carrollton, Ga. A husband and father of three children, Penley hasn’t always painted with such purpose. These days, however, he produces hundreds of portraits of his favorite historical figures, such as Ronald Reagan and the Founders, to inspire patriotism in his fellow countrymen. “I just love my country,” he tells National Review Online.
Penley started doodling cowboys and Indians while growing up in Macon, Ga., and he continued his artistic diversions through high school. When he enrolled at the University of Georgia, however, he soon realized he “had no other marketable skills,” so he majored in art.
Penley, preppy and unjaded in his khakis and penny loafers, didn’t look the part of a tortured artist. “I remember the first day I walked into art class,” he reminisces. “Everyone stopped and got quiet. It was like an E. F. Hutton commercial.” And then he saw what his classmates were working on. “Their paintings were dark and brown and black and cynical,” he says.
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