Jasper Johns’ “Flag” once sold for $36 million. So what’s $1 million for a painting of Kanye West and President Trump?
Ment Nelson, a painter and South Carolina native like Johns, wants to know.
The watercolor “Kissin Up” was originally $5,000, but Nelson says after reconsideration, he decided to value his painting at what it’s really worth. “I thought about the two people I’m painting,” Nelson says. “Donald Trump, he’s a billionaire, and Kanye West, he’s highly confident.”
Nelson liked the painting so much that he didn’t want to get rid of it for too little. So, you can now purchase the 18” x 24” watercolor on his website for a cool $1 million.
It is his most controversial work, he says, as it tends to ruffle both Democrats and Republicans. Those on the Left don’t want to have Trump or West in a “Make American Great Again” hat in their homes, and those on the Right take offense at the allegation of “kissing up.”
“Then you have people who see the humor and don’t take it as serious,” Nelson says. “I’m actually a Kanye fan.”
Rather than staking a political claim, Nelson says he was simply capturing a moment. Yet even though it’s some of his finest portrait work, it’s one of his least-selling prints. His most popular is “Old Sheldon,” a painting not of politics, but of his community.
When abstract impressionist painter Jasper Johns was born in 1930, his family lived in Allendale, South Carolina, less than half an hour from Varnville. That’s where Nelson lives, in a “double wide trailer on a dirt road.”
“I don’t see myself any different from a Jasper Johns,” he says. It feels like a bold claim, but it’s not too bold. Johns was just 34 years old when he began painting “Flag,” his best-known work. Nelson is 30. He hasn’t yet sold “Kissin Up,” but he’s developed a portfolio of paintings and photographs, as well as a decent online following.
With 19,000 followers on Twitter, Nelson says his virtual presence is important to him. It may be the only way for him to succeed without leaving Varnville, population just over 2,000.
“I just made a conscious decision to stay here,” he says. “A lot of people who do what I do in South Carolina, they move away to larger cities, but I feel like now is a unique time in history because we have social media.”
Nelson’s biggest break so far has been his inclusion in the traveling Smithsonian Institution exhibit “Crossroads: Change in Rural America.” The exhibit features depictions of Main Streets and tractors, wood-paneled homes and, in “Old Sheldon,” Nelson’s grandmother going crabbing.
“It’s something that’s unique to this area of South Carolina,” he says. “Everybody fishes, but I don’t think everybody crabs.” After he and his grandmother were catching crabs one day, he decided to paint the scene “to show people you can embrace the culture around you. You can make it cool.”
That’s one mission of Nelson’s art, to highlight the unique aspects of the culture in low country South Carolina. But there’s another way he wants to give his community voice. After he decided to price his Trump-West painting at $1 million, he began to hope more people in his hometown would adopt the same radical approach to their own value.
“If more people take on that attitude and know what they’re really worth, you start to see a lot more people become more entrepreneurial, more independent,” he says. “You treat yourself different, you look at life different.”
After he saw the video of Trump and West’s White House meeting in October, Nelson simply thought, “It just seemed to me that Kanye was kissing up.” His painting shows West smiling with smudged lipstick, while Trump scowls off into the middle distance with a red kiss mark on his right cheek. Neither one looks at the other, and they appear as a split-screen on different-colored backgrounds.
He may never sell it, but Nelson stands by his price. “I know my worth,” he says. Someday, he’s confident, everyone else will too. Nelson is committed to painting new concepts, and he hopes to display his work in a gallery soon.
Again, he draws a comparison with Johns. “He broke records as being one of the highest-selling living artists,” Nelson says. “Why not me?”
