George W Bush exhibits his paintings of world leaders

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Art critic Alastair Sooke gives his verdict on a set of portraits of world leaders, including Tony Blair, painted by former US president George W Bush

It is notoriously hard to judge the merits of a painter without seeing his work at first-hand – unless the artist in question happens to be George W Bush. Since stepping down as America’s 43rd president in 2009, “Dubya” has occupied himself with learning how to paint. And when some of his pictures, including two extravagantly bizarre self-portraits of himself in his bathroom, were leaked online last year, his idiosyncratically naïve and skew-whiff style was plain for all to see.

It turns out that, whether artfully or not, Bush paints in a similar fashion to the way he talks – affecting a folksy, homespun, plain-speaking tone, with just enough ham-fisted strangeness and bungling missteps to keep things interesting. In fact, Bush’s paintings exhibit many of the hallmarks of so-called “outsider art” – which, as visitors to last summer’s Venice Biennale will know, is very modish at the moment within the world of contemporary art. As a result, while history is unlikely to be kind to his presidency, the man who once suffered the indignity of a poll branding him the most unpopular political leader in modern American history, is now finding favour as an artist.

Perhaps emboldened by the reception for his paintings, which ranged from gentle bemusement to tongue-in-cheek adulation from hipster website BuzzFeed, Bush decided to mount an exhibition containing more than two dozen of his painted portraits of world leaders at the George W Bush Presidential Center in Dallas.

The first image I looked for, inevitably, was that of Tony Blair. As an artist, Bush has earned a reputation for churning out kitsch images of dogs, including his beloved (and now dead) pet Scottish terrier, Barney. What would he make, then, of the man often characterised as “Bush’s poodle”? The answer, I am sad to report, is that Blair appears like a perfectly dignified statesman, if one with a noticeably receding hairline who has been positioned, inexplicably, off-centre towards the right of the image – a misguided pictorial decision that gives undue prominence to the distractingly bright background. I can’t help feeling that Bush missed a trick here.

As for the rest of the paintings, at the time of writing, it was only possible to inspect a selection of officially released photographs documenting the interior of the exhibition from afar. Still, several things were clear.