VIRTUAL GALLERY Portraits of Barack Obama, sold for a few dollars to a few hundred, proliferate on the Web.

By RANDY KENNEDY


Mimi Torchia Boothby’s job as a technician puts her outside a wind tunnel every weekday at the Boeing plant south of Seattle, but in her free time two years ago she took up watercolors. Among her favorite subjects are cats, idyllic scenes of Italy - and, of course, Barack Obama, whose contemplative, sun-splashed portrait she completed a few weeks after his election as president.

She was so happy with it she started offering fine prints of it on the Web, her first proud professional act as an artist, and has since sold more than two dozen at $40 apiece. “Talk about viral,” Ms.Boothby, 57, said. “Most of the people who bought them were people I didn’t even know.”

Perhaps not since John F.Kennedy, whose dusty portraits can still be seen in kitchens and barbershops and alongside the antique beer cans at bars like Manuel’s Tavern in Atlanta, has a presidency so fanned the flames of painterly ardor.

Mr.Obama’s campaign was well known for inspiring art, including Shepard Fairey’s ubiquitous “Hope” poster, a version of which is now in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. Months after the election, it might have been expected that enthusiasm for Obama art would be dimming, too.

Yet the still-ample offerings of original paintings of the president and the first family on eBay and at places like the annual Affordable Art Fair in New York - along with a crop of presidential- art-obsessed Internet sites including obamaartreport.com, artofobama.com and, inevitably, badpaintingsofbarackobama.com - are indications that it might just be a growth industry.

The phenomenon has been a boon to the near-anonymous painting factories crowded together in the suburbs of Shenzhen, China, famous for cranking out copies of masterpieces, along with landscapes and semitasteful nudes. Another one, seemingly based in Germany, offers stately Obamas amid air-brushy likenesses of Tupac Shakur, Bruce Lee and Al Pacino (in his “Scarface” role), advertised as “real hand-embellished” paintings.

Market interest has also helped small-time artists like Dan Lacey, of tiny Elko, Minnesota, a self-described disillusioned conservative who made a name for himself last year in the blogosphere with his inexplicably strange portraits of Senator John Mc- Cain and Governor Sarah Palin depicted with pancakes stacked on top of their heads.

Lately, he has turned to Mr.Obama, producing both eBay-ready conventional portraits - “I hate to say this, but I can do ones like that in about an hour,” he said - and even stranger works that have tended toward portrayals of the 44th president naked on a unicorn, often performing gallant deeds like wrestling a bear on Wall Street or taking the controls of the US Airways flight that landed in the Hudson River.

Among Mr.Lacey’s eBay customers is Gary Rogers Wares, a manager at a stationery and gift manufacturer in Culver City, California, who has a gold-hued Obama in his office behind his desk and just won another one at auction for $28.

“I wanted a painting because it’s something unique, and as far as I’m concerned it’s unique, just like our president is,” Mr.Wares said. “This is historic and you want something that feels like an heirloom.”

A 90-day search by eBay under the category of Obama paintings, most of them original creations, not posters or prints, found 787 works offered for sale from mid-February to mid-May, generating almost $20,000 at an average price of $118 a painting, said Karen Bard, a spokeswoman. Production generally seems to be running well ahead of demand.

Mr.Lacey, who admits to parting with paintings for as little as $1 on the Web, said he sold his presidentwrestling- a-bear fantasia for $600 and recently received a commission for a unicorn-themed Obama.

He intends to ride the surging presidential art wave as long as it will keep him afloat. During the previous administration, he said, he had also tried his hand at some portraits of George W.Bush but added, in a tone that mingled regret with professional candor, “You really couldn’t sell them.”