Radiooooo.com

"July 6, 1946 — Born in New Haven, Connecticut, to a young naval aviator father and a mother whose love of language would one day make their daughter-in-law a school librarian, George Walker Bush grew up in the windswept oil country of Midland, Texas, in a household defined by its warmth, its humor, and a family belief in public service so deeply held that it never needed to be announced — it was simply the way the Bushes moved through the world, generation after generation, with energy and purpose and an irrepressible refusal to take themselves too seriously. What almost no one predicted — including, by his wife Laura's joyful and slightly astonished admission, the people who knew him best — was that after the presidency ended and George Bush returned to his beloved Prairie Chapel Ranch outside Crawford, Texas, he would pick up a paintbrush for the very first time in his adult life and discover, in his sixties, a creative passion so deep and transformative that he would later say with complete conviction: 'Painting has changed my life in an unbelievably positive way.' The spark came from reading Winston Churchill's essay 'Painting as a Pastime,' and Bush reached out to a friend and artist named Pam Nelson to teach him the basics — starting with fruit, flowers, and plants, the ordinary subjects that have humbled and delighted beginning painters for centuries, before moving on to portraits of world leaders he had known during his presidency. His instructor Jim Woodson, a respected Texas artist, later said that of all the students he had ever taught in his life, George W. Bush was probably the most open to trying anything — that all he had to do was make a suggestion and the former president of the United States would attempt it with the focused earnestness of a student who genuinely wanted to grow, which is perhaps one of the most charming sentences ever spoken about a man who once led the free world. The turning point came when another of his instructors, the gifted Fort Worth painter Sedrick Huckaby, sat across from Bush one afternoon and suggested he paint people he knew but others didn't — and Bush's eyes lit up instantly: 'The vets!' he said, picking up his phone right there at the table to begin calling the servicemen and servicewomen he had come to know personally through the George W. Bush Institute's Military Service Initiative. What followed was Portraits of Courage — sixty-six full-color oil paintings of American service members, each accompanied by the former president's written tribute to that person's character and story, a book that became a number-one New York Times bestseller and raised funds for veterans' wellness programs, and an exhibition that made viewers walk through the gallery with tears in their eyes, feeling the gratitude and the humanity radiating from the canvases of a man painting not for critics or acclaim but purely out of the desire, as he put it simply, for people to come away thinking: 'Wow, this guy cares about them' — which, it turns out, is all George W. Bush ever really wanted anyone to understand."