Sketch Artist Isabelle Brourman’s Work Is an Ongoing Portrait of the President

Brourman departs from her contemporaries not only in style, but in her downtown-art-scene sensibility. She met her gallerist, Will Shott, at a Drunk Versus Stoned soccer game hosted in Montauk by the Tribeca dealer Max Levai and received her master’s from Pratt, where she was working on what she describes as “a lot of personal excavation stuff” that occupied a space between fantasy and diary. “I was coming out of a really long-term abusive situation, and I was using painting and mixed-media collage to find ways to retool traditional painting practice.” In 2022 Brourman was the first-named plaintiff among eight former students in a lawsuit against the University of Michigan and her undergraduate professor there, Bruce Conforth, who multiple former students alleged sexually assaulted and harassed them. The suit was filed outside Michigan’s statute of limitations and was dismissed, but it was amid the proceedings that she began watching coverage of Depp v. Heard. Feeling guilty for her voyeurism and in an effort to make something of her interest, she decamped to Fairfax County, Virginia, to paint the trial in real time. “I’ve always been a fan of gonzo journalism,” she says. About a year later, she brought her pencils and watercolors into Trump’s Manhattan criminal indictment, making a performance of her attendance in ’80s-esque outfits selected by the designer Mia Vesper, whose Lower East Side brick and mortar closed last year. Following the ear graze of an assassination attempt, she pitched herself to paint Trump at Mar-a-Lago, and he said yes. She’s still angling to do his presidential portrait—because, she says, all of her work is, essentially, an ongoing portrait of the president. “I got a lot of shit for drawing Trump, and I still get a lot of shit about what side I’m on, but I’m like, this is a big project and I don’t know where it’s going,” Brourman says. “Portraiture isn’t always valorous, scenes aren’t always valorous.” She notes Francisco Goya, who in his capacity as first court painter made what are now recognized as critical and satirical portraits of Spain’s monarchs and nobility. “It’s about following your own vision, which is the only way to slip through a broad-stroke, occupational, big-force thing.”