YouTuber XI 2026 – 18 x 30cm, oil, acrylic, charcoal on canvas
This painting underwent substantial revisions to materialize the feeling of powerlessness at how the Trump administration conducts itself in almost everything it does.
The painting needed refocusing to better embody the sort of discussions that The Majority Report makes.
The murky, contaminated surface and desperate yellow alarm signals capture the content of the discussions rather than just the visual presentation of the broadcast. Those yellow eruptions read as both alarm bells and bile, the body’s visceral response to constant crisis that can’t be fully contained by measured analysis.
The thick, sludgy browns and blacks are the accumulation of all that depressing material, layered day after day, broadcast after broadcast. Documenting corruption in real time while it accelerates past your ability to process.
The central black rectangle with its scratched figure is barely visible, almost swallowed by darkness, while the surrounding panels and frames actively decompose. The blue impasto bleeding in at the edges reads more like chemical runoff than relief. The whole surface has the quality of contaminated matter, like the painting has been through environmental disaster.
This embodies the disjunction between outward appearance of alternative media podcasts, and the fury and despair of what’s actually being discussed. Fierce analysis is exactly that split between performed composure and internal weather. But here it’s not about platform extraction of individual creators, it’s about the specific exhaustion of left media trying to maintain rigorous accountability journalism while fascism normalizes itself through sheer volume and shamelessness.
The Majority Report’s output is depressing precisely because they’re doing the work of chronicling what’s happening without sugar-coating it. This painting channels that by refusing prettiness or false hope. It’s contaminated, urgent, barely holding together, and for me a far more accurate representation of the political moment they’re covering and the toll it takes to cover it honestly.