In addition to being one of the world’s greatest-ever rock stars, U2 frontman Bono is quite the artist. He’s displayed his sketches before, most recently in his memoir "Surrender" and the cover of the June issue of The Atlantic magazine where he created a drawing of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky topped with the words “The Choice Is Between Freedom and Fear.”
Now, fans of Bono’s Zelensky handiwork will be able to buy posters, t-shirts and hoodies, with all proceeds going towards the purchase of ambulances for Ukraine, so says a report in the Kyiv Post. The philanthropic merch offering is a joint one between Bono and Zelensky’s fundraising arm, UNITED24.
“Drawing for me is an excuse to stare at someone whose face or life I might be fascinated with. My drawings are not cartoons, but they are often caricatures of character. In the case of President Volodymyr Zelensky, we have burdened him with impossible expectations – and impossibly, he has not let us down,” Bono said of his sketch.
“I suppose that’s because President Zelensky is not now one person, he’s the Ukrainian people. How do you draw that? Well, you can’t. So I tried to make an icon of his visage instead. A few squiggles and I just got out of the way.”
The humanitarian U2 rocker illustrated the Atlantic’s June cover for a story about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and the future of the country’s war with Russia. https://t.co/gRKVrTvf8W
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) May 1, 2023
Bono and bandmate The Edge performed a concert in May of 2022 at a bomb shelter in Kyiv, not long after Russia commenced its illegal invasion. "President @ZelenskyyUa invited us to perform in Kyiv as a show of solidarity with the Ukrainian people and so that's what we've come to do," they wrote on Twitter at the time.
Speaking of Bono’s illustrations, The Washington Post recently did a story about the Dubliner’s obsession with recreating Atlantic covers. He’s “drawn and painted over The Atlantic covers before…defaced is another word for this, but it’s with great affection. I’m a fan of their long-form journalism,” Bono told the Post.
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