Originally painted for the show Friends and Family at Shaheen Modern and Contemporary in Cleveland back in 2007, I wanted to include works of great Ohio champions, and of course, Paul Newman was an Ohio Buckeye. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is a movie classic, which helped to epitomize the era, but also for me, the homosocial relationship of the Newman and Robert Redford characters. Like so many in the ’60s (and myself now) I feel the counterculture revolution matters, and bringing my all to the characters I portray in my narratives that hopefully make the world a better place, I feel a real affinity to both Newman and Redford as they made their careers more than just being famous, but being incredible actors and filmmakers (and supporters) that create and portray content, like in Butch and Sundance, that have larger allegorical resonance where people can cathect to both the emotions and portrayals within the narrative to reflect back on their own real life and world in order for it to progress.
Although this is a sad ending of these characters, they “die with their boots on,” creating a tableau for the whole Last Judgment sequence of my exhibition, rising to heaven, but also, as the wonderful humans, Newman and Redford continued making fantastic works (and food, in Newman’s case, and Sundance et al. in Redford’s!) that make the world a better place.
I painted this for a show called Friends and Family and like here, it mirrored Anne Frank’s image, with 9/11 in the middle. I was thinking of course of all these hero victims, Matt Shepard being the young man in Wyoming who was found chain tied to a fence in Wyoming, a martyr for gay and LGBTQ+ causes. He was murdered for being gay and became a symbol and helped to expose the violence and homophobia still prevailing in society. This was an image taken by his best friend, the one who wrote her own memoir, Losing Matt Shepard, Beth Loffreda. She writes what seems an accurate account, that sometimes Matt could be a pain, but mostly he was a sweet guy.
He had grown up mostly in Wyoming and where he also went to college, after a short time living as an adult in Denver, Colorado, where I grew up. He might have been a methadone dealer, and was an intense, political guy who also had bouts of deep depression that he had been hospitalized for, and more. Two guys picked him up to rob him–pretending they were gay to rob him in their truck (although it was alleged one of them might have slept on and off with Matt), and after Matt put his hand on one of their knees, it sent them into a homophobic panic, and they ruthlessly beat him and left him to rot chained to a fence, only to be found by a jogger, who thought he was a scarecrow, a day or so later. Matt didn’t survive the brutal beating, but his legacy did.
Beyond the numerous plays, books, documentaries, and more, the Matthew Shepard Act against hate crimes like those against Matt was finally passed into law by Obama in 2009. In the late ’90s when this happened it was big news, as many hadn’t realized the persecution that gays receive, still today. I loved him while painting him, and loved that he was like a saint, but also a real gay young man with issues, that wanted to change the world, by journalism or otherwise, and did, despite the horrific tragedy in which it happened.
I was living in SoHo during the time of 9-11, and that morning heard the planes flying overhead as I was preparing to go to work to teach drawing at New York University. Very soon my partner and I saw the news on the television that a plane had hit one of the towers, and we left the apartment to see the hole in the building, with the people inside quite visible from the intersection nearby our apartment at the intersection of West Broadway and Prince. In shock, I proceeded to go to my class (I was to teach my freshman "composition via the gag cartoon"), where my students were awaiting, also stupefied as to what was happening in the city and country at that moment. I told them that I certainly didn’t feel it right to look at cartoons at that moment, and although I don’t necessarily feel "art is therapy," but perhaps we should go out to Washington Square Park and draw what it was that was happening at that moment. We went to the park, by that time the second plane had hit the other tower, and just as my students began to draw, the first tower collapsed. Adults in the park cried and shouted out in pain, and my students and myself comforted whom we could, and I dismissed class, telling the students to please call their parents and let them know they were okay.
My own father was in town, whom we spent the rest of this time with, and who also collected the newspapers, telling me "I should paint images of this one day." I told him "no, that this was in bad taste" and found other means and images to express my feelings and ideas towards the horrific events of this time in the proceeding years. However, I continued to have nightmares, one in particular that I saw the falling bodies of the victims of the towers, whom (being a John Lennon fan) I called out to saying "all you need is love!" One morning, after a particularly acute nightmare in 2007, I felt the desire to dig out one of the newspapers my father had given me to save, and began to paint this few series of paintings. I felt it would be cathartic to finally paint directly (and not, as previously, by means of allegory) imagery from the morning of 9-11, in order to "save" the people of this tragedy by remembering their images and the events by painting them.
This was one of the most difficult paintings I have ever created. To make myself calm and to allow myself to keep working, I listened to audio cd’s of lectures and writings of the Dalai Lama and also Tibetan chants, along with soothing (and symbolic—as in Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, etc.) classical music that (like I do with all my works) created a synaesthetic audio environment for me to create in. This painting took a very long time (for me) to paint, as I wanted to micromanage as much as possible to make the best painting I could to record what had happened and also my sensory memory and feelings of the moment as a witness to it all. It was a "beautiful" clear day that morning, and I was (as were many) fully aware of the irony of such a horribly catastrophic event juxtaposed to a clear and light blue sky of a September morning. I tried my best to record the colors as they appeared in the source image, in addition to being mindful of my thoughts and memories of that day as I was painting, hoping that the emotions I felt would come through the translation of my rendering. I am also influenced by much of art history, and impressionism and the works of Monet were something of particular relevance to the time of this painting, and in the back of my mind (although I wanted to avoid consciously contrived relevance) thought of Monet’s smoke in his train and the Gare Saint-Lazare paintings. I am also a son of a psychoanalyst, and believe in the ideas of the subconscious "leaking through" in painterly works, and hope that in the micromanaging of what I perceived in looking and remembering the image as I was painting it, that the ineffable and unconsciously symbolic ideas and emotions might also present themselves somehow in how I was painting the image, to make it have a life of its own. Ultimately, I hope to have done justice to the people that were directly affected by the tragedy, and our nation and world that were forever changed in my painting of this historical event.
After painting this work (and the other triptych now in the Corcoran Gallery) I was gratified in the sense that I no longer had the nightmares of that morning and its victims. However, I was nervous to exhibit the painting for fear of how people might react. I first showed the work in a solo exhibition in Cleveland entitled "Friends and Family" (along with other important real and fictive people and events—such as Anne Frank—in a painting acquired by the Cleveland Museum, Matthew Shepard, JFK, the planet Earth, etc.). Instead of being offended, people were moved by the painting and received (at least those who discussed the image with me) basically what I had hoped they might—that it was an homage to those who died in the towers, and the day that changed history for all of us. I then exhibited the work in a group show at John Connelly Presents that was thematically curated around ideas of melancholy in America post-9-11, with similar responses. I finally wanted to exhibit the work in the context I had grown to desire the most, along with the 9-11 triptych that had more close-up views of those who died in the towers that day. This was in the exhibition "Good Leaders, Endangered Species, Ships at Sea" at Derek Eller Gallery in New York, the second part of an exhibition begun in Los Angeles at Lightbox Gallery, where I hoped that viewers would realize through the juxtaposition of imagery that "we need good leaders, as they are like endangered species, in a world that was a ship at sea." Along with images of Barack Obama, Louise Bourgeois, endangered animals, and references to religious icons of now (like the Dalai Lama) and art history (as in appropriations of the Duccio painting at the Met of the Madonna and Child, and El Greco’s Opening of the Fifth Seal) I was able to show this work isolated with the other 9-11 paintings to represent allegorically "ships at sea" but mostly directly reference this event for what it represents for all of us.
It was my hope that a museums in Washington D.C. and New York City would finally acquire these works, as I didn’t want them to go to personal collections and that they would be safely in museums in the cities that were directly affected by the tragedies of that morning. I am very honored that the Whitney Museum of American Art would want to have this painting in their permanent collection. This is a most moving to me, and I hope it helps others remember this day and everything that it conveys symbolically and emotionally, and I truly hope it honors those who were lost and affected by one of the most tragically important mornings in our nation’s history.
I felt it would be cathartic to finally paint directly (and not, as previously, by means of allegory) imagery from the morning of 9-11, in order to "save" the people of this tragedy by remembering their images and the events by painting them. I found this image at the NY Picture collection, a part of the Mid Manhattan Library. The original photo was taken by an amateur photographer Seth McAllister, and as he wrote me after seeing the work at the Whitney (I didn’t know originally who had taken the image), it appeared on the cover of the Washington Post and appeared elsewhere and is still available from AFP (Agence France Presse). Fortunately, Mr. McCallister was happy to see it rendered "in such a beautiful way," despite its troubling subject matter.
When I paint my imagery based on appropriated sources and/or historical imagery, I research my topic seriously, so as to fully understand what it is I’m creating an image of, and in the hope that not only will it have intellectual value in terms of its content, but that it might also resonate emotionally and transcend received notions and ideas to ultimately create an ineffable, sublime effect. Much like a method actor who would suture his own life into his character to both better understand his subject and to breathe life and real emotion into his performance, I try my best to understand the person I’m portraying as I’m painting a portrait, or world of a person or a culture, to help animate it and make it become alive, through empathy and compassion, as if I’m talking with them (NOT ventriloquizing through them) to honor who they are as human beings and how they might have changed the world for the better.
Many of my thoughts regarding this are inspired by Scott McCloud’s great book Understanding Comics, when he discusses the power of an icon—that it is relatable to a large audience, and that, at least in the case of an essentialized iconic form like a cartoon, that “we” become “it” when we view the image. Much like the Chinese monks who would enter into a state of “maw” when they made a screen or scroll—wanting themselves as artists, in addition to the viewer, to “enter nature,” they would meditate while rendering and “become” the simplified figure in a complex background, using it as an avatar into that world, I sometimes use real-life icons to not only create allegories based on what people might know about that figure and how it operates within the context I created for it, but also, by my handling of the paint and formal nuance, for them to “feel” what the character might be feeling.
While painting anything associated with Anne Frank I listen to the audio tapes of her diary, music that was recorded around the same time that they hypothetically could have been listening to and read research and view films about her and this period when I take breaks from my painting. When I finished this, my first portrait of her (now at the Cleveland Museum!), it was at the end of a long process where I had listened several times to the entire audio of the diaries, and at the end of my painting the tape was at a biographic section describing her seeing her long-lost friend and her weeping, and I found myself crying looking at my painting and feeling for her. Since then, I keep being drawn back to her as a figure (many shows in NY featured images of her, and my recent show in Amsterdam had over ten drawings of her—one constituted over forty tiny drawn portraits based on her photobooth pictures) and hope that I learn more each time and the work has become even more nuanced.
With this work, I was thinking of course of her to honor her and her legacy, but also thought a little of art history. Warhol was famous for bringing folks into a photobooth, and provoking them to smile and make great pictures, that he would then airbrush and make glamorous into silkscreened paintings—but in doing so would flatten the image, and in the case of many celebrities, flatten out their spirit—like in ideas of post-modernism, where agency (who we are as individuals and peoples) gets folded, like flour into pizza dough, into the capitalist machine. I also love and revere painters like Rembrandt, who was able to bring such depth and emotion to his portraits in his painterly masterly manner. What if you could bring that emotion to an iconic image, celebrate icons that have made history and changed the world, but also paint them in a manner that heralds their person? I think any great portrait has a good likeness, but more importantly, can bring out the spirit of the person behind their facade. I’m hoping with this work, that I am honoring Anne Frank, who wrote about wanting to be a great writer, and bring attention to the persecution of the Jews and all that were murdered in the Holocaust—this was so performative, as of course she was a GREAT writer who did exactly this. Also, she was coming of age in an era of begetting feminisms and wanted to be a strong female protagonist of her own life, and inspired so many, including young women, to be great and independent for generations, and generations still to come.
I was glad that when the contemporary wing of the Cleveland Museum opened after lengthy renovation, they installed this work where it remained for years. Then, it was moved to their Gallery One, where they would have an example of work to introduce each section of the museum at the entrance for visitors and children. A curator there told me how, in the accumulation of these many years, literally millions of people saw my work, including thousands of children, who they would have sit in front of the work, and after discussing it, would have the kids write their thoughts and reflections. There is no greater honor for an artist than to have their work in a museum, and I was beyond moved to learn about the children—for me art is about teaching, and teaching is an art, and art is language, and language is power. I’m hoping all that Anne Frank represents and as a portrait of this intrinsically great writer is honored by this work, and that all that see it reflect upon her, her legacy and writings, and of the horrible history of the Holocaust.
When I grew up in the ’70s Elvis was a “fat joke” to the kids, we didn’t realize his importance, just America’s infatuation with him. I remember seeing his “Aloha from Hawaii via Satellite” in 1973 when I was seven years old, and I remember when he died–I was in the Southglenn Mall in the suburbs of Denver and remember seeing a display of Elvis on this sad occasion, next to the Bowie Low album cover, which had also been just released, which intrigued me much more … But finally, back in the ’90s, I kept thinking about icons that truly changed culture, and how Warhol was so good at flattening the icon into a stamp like persona, much in the way in capitalism and current technocratic culture agency—who we are as spirits, souls, and individuals, is reified, like flour folded into pizza dough, the capitalist machine…
I was thinking about Elvis, and of course we all love the Sun Sessions early songs, but I watched, for the first time, the famous 1968 “comeback” special—and it bowled me over. We forget in our contemporary times what it must have been like to see single individuals, with tremendous talent and the urge and motivation to change the world, perform as artists, with a whole country watching (in an age when there were only three or four networks), and having that individual make a HUGE impact. Singer Presents …Elvis—the show more known as the famous ‘68 Comeback Special was like this, he was only thirty-three years old, but his big hits had been back starting in 1956, he went into the army, and came back tamed, doing stupid movies with Colonel Tom Parker, that made money, and he sang to a pre-recorded soundtrack, but was on autopilot, and lost his true rock and roll fans. The producer of the Comeback Special, who loved him, took him on a walk down Sunset Boulevard, and Elvis realized he lost it as people didn’t recognize him, or if they did, they didn’t care.
Instead of the Christmas special the Colonel had planned, the producers wanted Elvis to go back to his roots, and he was able to get his two old front men, Scotty Moore and drummer D. J. Fontana, to the studio, where they had acoustic, sit-down sessions that were edited down to some of the most fantastic live TV ever recorded—imitated by MTV and so many others, with the engine of Elvis’s genius driving it all. The stand-up full band numbers were also great—Elvis since the army had only performed for movie cameras, and having a live audience was super invigorating for him. The dance numbers have a bunch of ’70s cheese melted in, and a tribute to the equally cheesy film output by Elvis, but he is somehow able to rise above it all. The song that is the title of this work, “If I Can Dream,” was a heartfelt tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, that Elvis lip syncs to (he sung the original recording in a room by himself, curled in a fetal position on the floor), that is moving and great.
Elvis recorded songs other people had written—Bob Dylan and the Beatles ushered in the whole singer-songwriter movement, that made much of Elvis passé—but as an artist who works with appropriation, I love him. He can sing way better than Dylan or Lennon/McCartney, not with irony, but with complete sincerity and deep resonance. He liked to sing every people song, country ballads, and gospel—sometimes the more normalized and banal, the better. He can synthesize his moods and feelings so well to the lyrics—that, like Hallmark Cards, are sometimes so sentimental or bathetic that anyone in the world can identify with them—but with such a wealth of emotion and beautiful singing it’s transportive. I hope in my painting I can bring emotion and feeling into my painterly brush…. If Warhol “flattened” out his icons, perhaps if you could paint figures that changed culture more like Rembrandt or an old master, bringing warmth and feeling back to them, you could have something new, like how Elvis breathes life and beauty into everyday songs (particularly as they are every-day emotions and feelings we all think about)…
The inset TV guide image was from his ’56 days, I think on The Ed Sullivan Show, where again he had most of the viewing night on television audience, again changing culture—amazing from then to the comeback how much had changed—and in the nine short years after the special, all that would come before his sad demise. Elvis really changed the world through music and was an amazing individual who was kind and Christ-like, also evoked here. Like the audience in a bullfighting painting by Goya, the crowd here looks ravenous and unhealthy, they are like animals feeding off their heroic icon, who gives everything for them. To me, this is like the life of the artist, and Elvis was one of the greats, who I still think about (and whose music, which expands generations and genres of storytelling) and is relevant as much to me today as when I first “rediscovered”” his genius.
I painted this image for a show called Friends and Family, that depict a wide range of iconic figures, images and moments from popular culture, history, art, literature, film and music in the service of composing a larger allegorical narrative about the times in which we live, and the issues and values that shape our collective history and future. I wanted to be at once individual and collective, admonishing and optimistic, for my work to serve as both a personal homage to those people and experiences that have shaped his own individual identity and beliefs, and a reminder of their broader social and historical impact.
I wanted to endeavors to imbue the theme/notion of friends and family with a broader, social and humanistic concept. Although I base my paintings on pictures appropriated from magazines, books, newspapers, and films, his complete personal immersion in, and reverential, painterly treatment of his chosen subjects and moments transforms them, allowing them to transcend time and context, and the pre-existing source imagery from which they derive. My respect for post-modernism results in paintings that are highly self aware and referential to external ideas and politics. Simultaneously, my love of modernism renders my paintings highly personalized, allowing them to move beyond their original context, and become as much about what I bring to and invests in my subject matter than the subject matter itself. Through coupling this with a painterly verve reminiscent of Impressionist and old master painting, I seek to a foster post-post modernist sensibility that embraces concept, beauty, emotion, transcendence, and the subconscious.
Muhammad Ali is one of the greatest icons of all time, which has earned his place in world history. People forget that he was born Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr., having changed his name after converting to Islam and his affiliation with the Nation of Islam, an incredibly radical public thing to do as a great American who also happened to be the smartest, greatest Heavyweight Champion of the World. After his public outcry against the Vietnam War, he was outcast and denied a boxing license in every state and stripped of his passport. He couldn’t fight for three years, touring colleges to speak out against the war, and advocating African American rights, justice, and pride. The Supreme Court finally overturned his conviction, and he was able to fight again, famously beating Joe Fraizer in the "Fight of Century." This is around the time this LIFE magazine came out, and I learned much about boxing and his amazing influence around the world, where he was like a king for so many people in so many countries and still is to many. He was a fiercely intelligent, brave, and courageous fighter, and continues to be an inspiration to this day.
This is from an image for the Friends and Family show at Shaheen Gallery in Ohio. Hamlet 1999 was a homoerotic, sci-fi screenplay I had written back in 1999/2000, with the faint hopes of somehow turning it into a film or comic but ended up making an extensive body of work that was like a “comeback” show for me, and the beginning of this My American Dream body of work encapsulated in this tome. I worked for over twenty-five years teaching at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, in the Cartooning & Illustration Department, as the Cartooning Coordinator, the head of the comics program. I came from comics, and the non-linear aspect of how I arrange my shows of different images in consciously juxtaposed sequences comes from an avant-garde-like idea of comics and their language structures. I went one summer to a three-day symposium by Bryan Singer, then the famous young director of The Usual Suspects, the X-Men movies, and more. He had gone to SVA as an undergrad and was “paying back” his dues by coming and pretty much just doing Q and A and regaling us with his stories.
I had created the graphic novel Horror Hospital Unplugged with author Dennis Cooper, and this, and a couple screenplays under my belt, and aspired for a time to bring my vision to films and/or animated movies, etc., and thought it would be inspirational to meet him. He was sort of nice, but also sort of a jerk, he had a student following him, bringing him in his books, etc., and you could tell they had struck up a relationship—later Singer would get into trouble for things like this and it was a little creepy. But his stories were good, and I thought it would be edifying to try to learn something—also comics are very much like storyboards for films to be made, and this was important for me as the head of the department.
But the whole experience also reinforced the idea that I had made a great choice to be an artist who also taught comics (in addition to fine art). Singer’s stories were about so much business and compromise, and it takes so long to bring about a movie from conception to production, that I realized how happy I was being a master of my own domain and making paintings to please myself and hopefully others too (and keeping it real teaching comics by students who then would make comics for the world!). There was a homeless guy that I would pass getting coffee for SVA every day, and sometimes he would have interesting trinkets to sell. On one of the Singer days, he had this photo—which was sepia toned and wonderfully strange—and it was “signed” by Laurence Olivier—this seemed obviously fake, but it could have been an image of Olivier—the homeless guy mentioned that it was from a production by Olivier in Russia, or something? Also weird, but I thought the image was compelling, the backdrop of Elsinore (where we also had a cabin in CA) looked like a castle rocket ship, the proscenium was alluring and magnificent, and the whole thing seemed like it came from a dreamworld, one in which the Hamlet figure looks proud, but also with great misgivings, about the world around him and power, something in the W. era that was very much on my mind.
It was fun to spend days on this painting, to me it was like a self-portrait, committed as I am to the language of art to change things, committed as I am to be painting and storytelling (and teaching, too). I loved the theater of this—and Olivier was also a titan of an actor—who was openly bisexual and/or gay, who brought emotion and feeling, like a method actor, to his roles, something that I try to emulate in my paintings and in my life.
This was for a show I had in Cleveland at Brett Shaheen Modern and Contemporary, called "Friends and Family." I didn’t want McCain to win the next election, and Ohio being a swing state (like my home state Colorado) I wanted to do "my part" by creating a conversation of who might be "friends and family" for the America I want to live in, one that is about the agency of all peoples to rise up, and have equal power for everyone. Katherine Hepburn is a "strong female protagonist" of all the films she is in, a powerful figure in Hollywood cinema who also acted as a wonderful role model for all. She was one of the first to wear pants suits for women, helping to create a craze for this fashion, which become ubiquitous and also symbolically powerful. She also was fiercely independent, outspoken, and strove and fought for her important place in Hollywood for her long career. Despite her secret long affair with Spencer Tracey, its also rumored she was bisexual, and/or a lesbian, which was probable, and was public speculation that didn’t diminish her idolization—which is also intriguing as she played spinsters in her later life that had indomitable, "unsinkable" spirits, like the great lady herself.
“The ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all.”—John F. Kennedy
JFK was a complicated man and president, but I love him and everything—at least as he has been amalgamated and promoted in contemporary American culture—about him. I was born in 1966, so missed the JFK experience, but as a child at the tail end of the baby boomers, the memory of him and his legacy permeates my own memories growing up in a super-lefty liberal household (also one begat by parents who got the hell out of the South).
Although as an adult, I have come to understand his complicated nature—that he came from extreme wealth and a politically problematic father and legacy, that he came into the presidency not as an advocate for civil rights, but was influenced by MLK and the civil rights movement to ultimately get on track for social justice, that he was nepotistic offering his brother Bobby his role in office (but ultimately he was also a great man that had also become “woke”), he was a womanizer, took heavy medication for his physical pains, etc.
But saints for me are human with human flaws, that can transcend them and do great things for the world and humanity, and JFK is one of those men. His presidency was short-lived, the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis were near-miss almost tragedies, but in the three-plus years of his presidency, he made great change and pivoted America and the world in the right direction (the ship of which we have for a long time been trying to keep steady). I love his integrity and his might, his power and humility, and his great presidency that changed the nation for the better. During the time of W., it was truly edifying to paint this amazing man, who was brilliant and honorable and served his country proud.
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” —Margaret Mead
This was from the first photograph taken of the earth, taken by scientist astronaut Harrison H. Schmitt, who was on the Apollo 17 crew on their way to complete NASA’s final mission to the moon.
My painting was in a show called Friends & Family, at Shaheen Modern and Contemporary Gallery in Cleveland, one of the early “chapters” of My American Dream. I placed it between the Jackie and JFK paintings included in this section. I was inspired by the first Al Gore documentary An Inconvenient Truth that also included it, thinking about a world without borders, and a planet that we all desperately need to take care of…
Of course, this is true now more than ever when America’s vote will truly decide the fate of our planet, and it seems on the brink of destruction by man’s hubris. If only Al Gore had become president as he should have, there may have been more time for us to pull out of the global tragedy of global warming, only time and fate will tell, and the willingness of governments and their people to bring us to a safe, green, beautiful, and bountiful planet.
Say what you will about JFK, and hopefully its mostly good things, but Jackie was a tremendous first lady. Kennedy I think was a great President, and symbolic for so much, but some people have their issues. I can’t imagine what you might want to say that would be negative about Jackie, who assumed her First Ladyship with perhaps not the same staunch power of Eleanor Roosevelt, but with a feminine power all her own. I like everything she stood for, and for her incredible finesse, protocol, and sense of fashion. When JFK died, she was the one who symbolically carried the weight for the country mourning—and instead of depicting her crying in her pillbox hat as Warhol did (although I did paint this as an emotional, expressionist moment also in the show), for this heavenly wall I thought it would be appropriate to place this painting, originally to serve as a model of a great American in the show Friends and Family at Brett Shaheen in Cleveland, next to the Madonna and Christ, as a non-religious portrait hopefully breathing life into this icon, in heaven as it seems she already is, standing in front of this screen which hopefully also comes alive in the hegemony of the painting. I love that she loved culture and historic places and things—it is because of her and her campaigning in part the Grand Central Station still stands, and that the Temple of Dendur graces the Met. She is one of our great first ladies, and never will be eclipsed (although Eleanor and Michelle Obama are definitely in her constellation!).
Edna Ferber was an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, and great matriarch of the Algonquin Round Table. Importantly for this painting, she was the wrote the 1952 novel Giant, which was the basis for the great movie of the same title of 1958, directed by George Stevens, and starring Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, Dennis Hopper, and James Dean, pictured here talking with the Grande Dame. Most of Ferber’s output starred Strong Female Protagonists speaking out for the marginalized and oppressed, and Giant was no exception, with Liz Taylor in one of her great roles, defending the Latino community of Hudson’s Ranch (one with whom their son played by Hopper marries), and holding off the advances of Dean’s character Jett Rink, a local handyman whom works for the patriarch Hudson plays, Jordan "Bick" Benedict. It strikes me that this great film, based on this amazing book, was so ahead of its time for feminisms and gender/identity politics (especially when you consider that both Hudson and Dean were gay in real life), and they were written by this sharp wit Ferber, who never married.
When they met on the set of Giant, Ferber mentioned that "James Dean was a genius, I don’t think there’s another actor in the world who could have portrayed Jett as well as he did. But like most geniuses, Dean suffered from success poisoning." When they met she supposedly said to Dean just this—"you remind me of myself, Jimmy, You’re a genius, but you suffer from success poisoning." Unfortunately, she was right—soon after his last day of shooting, Dead took off in his new Porsche to go to a race, and was driving fast when a truck, who didn’t see his small silver car racing in the California desert, broadsided him sending him hurtling to his death.
I loved my grandmother on my father’s side, Carolyn Mayerson, who was a bit of a dragon lady, who drank too much and chain smoked, and was a cantankerous mean lady when she wanted to be, which unfortunately was often. But she loved me, and loved art, too, and took my sister and I to museums, and encouraged us to draw new pictures for her and my grandpa which they would hang in their kitchen to eat their cereal by—her encouragement, and great knowledge of art, writing (she taught English at one time, too), and music was one of the reasons I became an artist, beyond my own parents loving encouragement and environment they created for me. Although she was edgy, I did respect her, and remember fondly our conversations, although she died when I was still young. It is partly this that I’m thinking about when I’m painting this picture, speaking through their avatars, although of course I love Dean, too, and this is about the friendship of these two great characters that strove to be heard and have great careers despite their normally marginalized status, and succeeded to great degrees to have massive impacts on the world.
MLK was a painting I did some years later after Hamlet 1999, but another stormy time in our world. We had moved to Chelsea, and I had a larger place to work and better light to work in, and we were generally happy, enjoying the success of my newly assimilated career, and our life in general, but Andrew’s best friend Alicia had just abruptly died, due to just-realized complications due to AIDS, and Hurricane Katrina had just happened down South. We were going through a lot of personal trauma as to Alicia, and were frankly appalled at the US government’s reaction to the tragedy befalling New Orleans and the southern region that many of my family come from. I felt if Dr. Martin Luther King were alive to experience what had happened, he would never stop crying, and painted this for the Miami art fair soon after the tragedy occurred. I do think art can make the world a better place, and after creating many narratives through the years "employing" famous actors and icons to play different characters, I realized that any portrait was truly about bringing out the inner personality of that person, and if I painted real people that had real relevance to impacting the culture of our world, I could make an iconic painting that would stand for both that person and allegorically what they represent to our culture, where the viewer could relate to the figure or scene also due to the modernist notions of how paint can transcribe warmth and feeling in the experience of looking at it, in addition to the content of what it could "mean." I hope that this painting of MLK goes beyond Katrina or other timely matters—I have painted a number of portraits of this great man (two of which were recently in the Whitney Biennial), and we have lived with this picture of him (one of my favorite portraits I have ever painted) on our walls for years to give us hope. Dr. King helped to change the world and give people agency through his passion and teaching and beliefs, and serves as a great model (I also appreciate that many homes throughout the world live with this image in photographs and posters) for all people including artists.
This is a picture of Marvin Gaye, an appropriation from the cover of his famous “What’s Going On” record that changed Motown records and made music history as being one of the most politically charged soul albums of all time. The smoky, spiritual sounds of it send me and I was obsessively listening to it while painting the “Archer Prewitt (Montgomery Clift)” painting that was also featured in the show this originated in “Rebel Angels at the End of the World” at QED Gallery in Los Angeles in 2005, and felt compelled to render the cover of Gaye’s masterpiece immediately. This album seemed more relevant than ever in those dour times as we were getting more involved in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and Gaye’s cynical, yet somehow ultimately hopeful view of humanity seems as necessary as ever. He is a transcendent figure, in a way a saint and a true rebel, one of our great artists, murdered by his own father. It is my hope to be able to make work, that like Gaye’s is able to address the culture outside of the work itself, to make work that is political and conscious of it’s place in contemporary times and also cultural history, but also to have the same work be beautifully formal, and ultimately transcendent beyond immediate context and times and meaning. Gaye began his amazing career as a Motown soul stylist, helping to forge the sound of that great studio, but as the politics of the time and the singer/songwriter movement grew to create songs of deeper meanings, Gaye fought for the right to make this and subsequent works of great meaning, and while Berry Gordy resisted this creative control, ultimately everyone realized the power of the work and it became one of the touchstone albums of all time. It’s always important to make work that is “about something”, but also, in a post Post Modern way, to make work that can also be instinctive, melodic, and ultimately sublime in transcendence beyond language. While painting this, I listened to Gaye obsessively, and tried to capture the spirit of all this while painting the cover of the album, like I used to listen to records as a kid while gazing at the cover, bringing me to another place within the music.
Inspiration
Portrait of Juan Pareja, by Diego Velasquez, 1650, Metropolitan Museum.
One of my favorite portraits at the Met, and one of my favorite in the world, is this picture at the Met of Juan Pareja. In fact, the day I found out I was in the Whitney Biennial, I was on the steps of the Met when I received the email, after taking my SVA comics kids on the “kinda like comics” tour of the Met. where we look at narrative works and also seek out the people of color and respectful pictures of women throughout the museum, to give these students (many of whom aren’t regular museum goers) as sense of the history of narrative in art, and also to demystify and give access to art history, which can seem remote to them, for political reasons of class, race, and gender. I don’t want to make the same mistakes of art history, and want to people my exhibitions of all kinds of communities and histories that make up our world. The “Sister Wendy” story of this work was that Velasquez was already famous in Spain, but when he wanted commissions while visiting Italy, he had his assistant Juan Pareja hold this painting up and slowly lower it, to show how well he painted and how he was able to capture the proud dignity of the man who carried the work, who was himself an artist, who Velasquez freed from slavery, and whose work he encouraged to leave around the studio to introduce it to patrons and royalty, establishing Area as a renown artist in his own right and lifetime. I hope to bring proud agency to the people in my painted portraits, especially those like Gaye, who changed culture with his amazing work.