WASHINGTON • Comedian Jim Carrey has spent a bunch of time over the past several years holed up in his studio, drawing, painting and sculpting.

For several months, he has been tweeting his political cartoons, featuring captions attacking the Donald Trump administration and prominent Republicans.

But his latest has drawn some loud criticism. The cartoon - believed to be of White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders - shows a scowling woman, which he referred to as a "so-called Christian whose only purpose in life is to lie for the wicked".

The morning talk show Fox & Friends did a segment on the portrait, asking if it had gone "too far".

Sanders' father, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, picked up on it, tweeting on Monday that Carrey was a "pathetic bully, sexist, hater, bigot and 'Christaphobe'".

The unflattering caricature and harsh caption are in line with many of Carrey's other political cartoons.

After the presidential election, he tweeted a sketch with the caption: "Don't worry. What we are is bigger than our differences, bigger than our president, bigger than our red, white and blues."

He followed that with anti-Trump memes.

Carrey tweeted his first political cartoon in August 2017, showing United States President Trump sailing on a sea of "lies" and asking: "What will it take for the GOP to throw this madman overboard?"

Known for both his slapstick comedic performances (Dumb And Dumber, 1994) and more serious roles (The Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, 2004), Carrey has in recent years largely disappeared from the spotlight, popping up only for bizarre red-carpet interviews and projects such as a Netflix documentary about his role as cult comedian Andy Kaufman in Man On The Moon (1999).

He has also devoted a lot of time to the visual arts - and he even had a pricey solo exhibit in Las Vegas back in September.

While his paintings cover a variety of subjects, he has painted Mr Trump several times. And he started tweeting such sketches more regularly starting in November.

He has also targeted Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, paid tribute to physicist Stephen Hawking, drawn a crying Abraham Lincoln and criticised the Republican tax plan with a sketch of House Speaker Paul D. Ryan.

In an interview in September last year with W Magazine, Carrey said it was cathartic to paint Mr Trump, adding: "I think no one can really escape that aspect of life at this moment - the feeling of loss of control."

He likened tweeting and drawing political cartoons to having a part to play in an unwanted battle.

He has been doing political cartoons "all along", he told the magazine. "When I was in grade six, my teacher confiscated a bunch of the cartoons I made in the back of class of her being mutilated by bombs and axes, dogs chewing her leg, whatever.

"And then she sent them back to me when I got famous," he added with a laugh. "She'd been saving them. She said she knew something was going on there."

Not everyone is a fan.

Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones has called Carrey "an astonishingly bad painter and sculptor".

Last year, Carrey released a short documentary, I Needed Colour, that showed his fans how he threw himself into art.

"When I really started painting a lot, I became so obsessed that there was nowhere to move in my home," he said. "Paintings were everywhere. They became part of the furniture. I was eating off them."

WASHINGTON POST