The Nature of Alexander was from a show I had in NYC at Derek Eller Gallery, Good Leaders, Endangered Species, Ships at Sea, where, right before Obama was elected (in fact, the poster image and first painting was of Obama, arms crossed, in front of the Capitol, right before he was elected—and right after the election, a McCain supporter called up the gallery—to take them off their mailing list—forever!).
I felt like we needed Good Leaders as they were like an Endangered Species in a world that was like a Ship at Sea, and mixed in paintings of endangered animals, maritime storm paintings, and pictures like this, mostly of living or contemporary civil rights and cultural heroes and more, for hopeful aesthetic poetic effect. The Nature of Alexander is an iconic painting for me, and personal, as I’ve been living with it for several years. It is based on a wrap-around cover for a historical fiction book by Mary Renault, that I grew up with, that first showed me that you could be gay and a good, strong and powerful leader at the same time. The statue is of the Pergamon head of Alexander, the left-hand side I believe is Greece, the right-hand side Turkey. While painting this, I listened to all the famous Lives of the Artists, by Giorgio Vasari, about Michelangelo, and all the art and artists that led to his time in the Renaissance, and a more contemporary “Lives of the Artists,” about painters from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from Manet, Turner, etc., to Picasso, Rothko, and Pop art. Many of my ideas of painting are included in this image, and I hope it becomes “abstract” in micromanaged moments and coheres together into an iconic presence from afar.
I painted this in a pivotal time in my life, where I needed to assert myself in the biggest possible manner to get ahead in my art and career. Truly it was inspiring. I also love Michelangelo, and painting after his classical busts and sculpture, and how he himself would copy the statuary from classical times, helping to bring us into the Renaissance. I wanted to move ahead in the world, and even though Alexander was a colonialist, at least he took care of and respected his countries. I’m not a colonialist, but I’m gay, and growing up looking at this book taught me you could be queer but also strong, a winner and not a sad sack, to be proud of who you were and stride forward optimistically for the best possible future, for yourself, your loved ones and family, and for the world.
This is from a scene in one of the David Attenborough nature series, of Humpback whales in the southern oceans of the Antarctic, who "fish" there for krill, a shrimp-like crustacean that exists in abundance, and the many birds all the other wildlife that this incredible event attracts. So many of the whales somehow know to go to this area, and work together to form net-like rings of bubbles that gather the krill in the center in which they come up the middle of to feast. I had wanted to do a painting of a real utopia, but was thinking of creating a painting of Bal’I Ha’I, from the film music South Pacific, of a mysterious island of paradise, and realized that real utopias do exist on Earth. Whales are such mysterious creatures that we still don’t know much about (although I’m a firm believer that they are sentient creatures that have a high degree of sophistication and would communicate with us more if they could), and scenes like this for me reach the sublime of nature, that we don’t know so much about this world and all of whom we share it with, and we are such narcissistic creatures we forget we are small part of the cosmology of living things in our world and our universe. I placed this work in a heavenly realm on the Last Judgment wall as I feel it truly is a heaven—perhaps we become reincarnated as whales or dolphins when we pass—maybe those who are doomed are the krill! But in all seriousness, heaven is on earth, beauty is everywhere on our planet, and I hope that we can survive as a species cultivating life on our planet instead of destroying it, getting smart about how to be our Earth’s caretaker for all those who benefit from it, most of all ourselves and future generations who rely on what we do now for their future—for us and all of our mother earth’s inhabitants. I hope like my other works this breaks into an abstraction, specifically allegorical for this one as we are like the fish in the sea—there are many of us and we need to cohabite with one another, respecting each other and our differences, and be together in our lives on our globe in order fur us to survive positively into the future. I do believe that art can change things for the better, and in my old age I would rather paint utopias than dystopias, as I want to live in the place I’m rendering to be in that meditation of my moments, in order to create works that will hopefully inspire others in their ponderings while looking at it—I think if we can all agree we need whales to be alive and roam free in our waters, along with other animals endangered or not to be alive on our planet, then that starts the even bigger conversation how we can do this all together in a karmic spirit of community and cooperation, commiseration of empathy and compassion for all.
I’ve done many pictures of Anne (one that has been at the Cleveland Museum of Art on continuous exhibition for years now), but this is one of my favorites. Although she wasn’t American, I hope that she and her story fits into this show as her work had more influence in America that it did in Europe when it first came out, and beyond relating the horrors of the Holocaust, she also was able to relay what it was to be a strong female protagonist to a nation of baby boomers, serving as a model of not just of Holocaust and Redemption, but also becoming a Judy Blume-like writer of a young woman who didn’t want to be "merely domestic" like her own mother. What’s also uncanny to remember is that she would still be alive if she hadn’t been murdered by the Nazis, and it could be quite possible she would have immigrated to America, where she would be about the same age as my father. I love this picture that I painted from a black and white photo, and like when I’ve painted other works of her, I listened to the entire unabridged Anne Frank diary, which I always find new relevance with, and profoundly am always moved by her strength, eloquence, but also maturity as she grows quickly from a young girl to an articulate, empathic and compassionate young woman. One thing that always strikes me when reading is that she says that she wants to be a writer who is able to relate the cause and plight of the Jews in exile to the world, and its performative, as while she is thinking this she is actually doing this, as her writing is one of the most important documents of our time about World War II. Pertinent to this image is the watch on her wrist, which reminds me of the short time she had, and unconsciously, as I finished the work, I realized the molding behind her reminds me of the train tracks to Auschwitz where she would be transported and perish, and also unconsciously, it seems that underneath the desk is a shape that reminds me of her heart, which was so strong, and her spirit, which is still alive today through her work. This originally was for a show entitled "Good Leaders, Endangered Species, Ships at Sea pt. II" which acted as a sort of "chapter" or "book" for the meta-narrative of My American Dream, the idea being that we needed more Good Leaders, as they were like an Endangered Species, in a world that was like a Ship at Sea, exhibited during the election that was won, wonderfully, by Obama. What better example of this subject than Anne Frank, who was such a great leader in a perilous time. I do think art can change the world and make it a better place, and Anne Frank and her work is an example of this and model for us all.
This is an early painting really from the Hamlet 1999 series that preceded this one, but I couldn’t help putting it in as it always has put a smile on my face, and more than this, truly has been a protector of sorts for my world and me. I love Keanu Reeves, and have employed him in my star system since I began showing my art in graduate school. He is the consummate Gen X Masculine Dude, who is able to be a man without being a dick, who is a gentleman but can show his strength when it counts, could hypothetically be any sexuality, any ethnicity, but a post-slacker man who may or may not be a great actor, but has been around for so many years and has made so many countless iconic films with great directors that to some degree he has earned his star to be undeniable. In The Matrix, one of the great films of the 90’s, the Wachowiski siblings (who also have their degree of pulpy greatness) turned Baudrillard on its head and made him culturally relevant. In this great false consciousness narrative, we wake up to find that we have been just mere cogs in a post-capitalist regime, sedated by machines to do their bidding, human batteries who mere purpose is to service the corporate commodity rule of robots. Keanu awakens as Neo, brought on by Morpheus, to save the vestiges of humanity, and like a steam punk William Blake, to bring them to a New Jerusalem. Keanu in this role was perfect—his stiffness appropriate to the Keanu School of Acting—maybe in this case like a living Buddha who kicks ass when he has to. I also love and teach Japanese Anime and Manga, and since the decline of their Emperor in WWII, they have been at a loss of a Patriarch and what it means to be a Man, John-Wayne style, striving instead perhaps, at least in the best of anime and manga, to be bishonen, beautiful men who get in touch with their embedded gender codes of femininity, and visa-versa for the women, who strap on masculine codes with kick-ass allure. Its no wonder that Lana Wachowiski became trans, as the gender bending of even a hyper action film happens as easily as a telepath considering the reality of a spoon, which bends at their will. In any event, this is the great scene where Keanu as Neo is positioned exactly right in front of Art Deco-esque glory emanata, as he recognizes the bullets, rendered in my case like the surface of Monet’s lily pads in the foreground, considers whether or not the bullets or even the attack is even real, and in so doing, allowing the bullets in his mind to be arrested in motion and fall to the ground before he turns on his heels to fly across the world and help to save the world. I teach comics at SVA and the power of icons and allegory, can be edutaining in pulp narratives that are divorced from religion and extreme ideology, but still carry truths in their pulpy assertion of their own intrinsic mythos. The Matrix hit a deep note in me when it most mattered, and still is one of my favorite films, where I really gave it my all to create an icon painting of an iconic character—he might not be a real Buddha or Savior, but he is more real and palatable to most for our time, more relatable and savvy to what was happening at the end of the 20th Century and the beginning of the 21st.
I created this work as part of my "Good Leaders, Endangered Species, Ships at Sea" series—during the time for the national elections I thought we needed Good Leaders, because they were like Endangered Species in a world that was like a Ship at Sea. I think everyone can hopefully agree that we need endangered species not to be so endangered in our world, and if we can all agree that these animals, in general, are beautiful, sentient creatures that deserve to live in an unsoiled environment, that can be a common meeting ground that we can all converge to figure out ways that we can help to sustain the world and all the flora and faun upon it for us and future generations of the world. I love whales, and the idea of whales being these incredibly intelligent, conversing entities that are living in the world with us almost like underwater intelligent alien beings of their own watery kingdom. I went to grad school at UC Irvine in Orange County, and lived in Laguna Beach, which was beautiful, but also becoming polluted, and the art scene they were very proud of, becoming a little—while I don’t want to be hierarchal about art and taste—cheesy. One of the kings of populist art in Southern California is Robert Wyland, who has famously painted whales on murals, canvas, and other surfaces, and has his own series of galleries, t-shirts, and more. Not to say anything bad about Wyland—I think he has his own true mission in art, and I really believe in "art for the people," and while being perhaps truly about acknowledging animals within our marine worlds in order to save them, I felt my mission in creating art with animals was to NOT make cheesy art. How could I bring something intrinsically artful to a whale image? I chose one from the NY Picture Library that seemed unusual and to really strike me—something personal about it (as I grew up in Colorado, far from the ocean and Alaska, but the mountains in the background reminded me of this), and the incredible gesture of this Humpback Whale brought out his sentient agency, while creating a surrealism in the water and his wondrous body. I wanted to create a feeling of movement in how I micromanaged the aesthetic movements, and love painting water, as it becomes so abstract, my "left brain" can’t synthesize what it "should" look like, and becomes a complicated microcosmic map to project my feelings and inner mind upon, hoping it will break into otherworldly worlds. I grew up with National Geographic’s WORLD magazine for kids, and will always remember listening to a floppy record that came in the magazine one month, of Robert Redford narrating whale songs, and I would listen to its otherworldly voices and be transported, like I did while painting this image that I hope pays homage to their sublime mystery.
“Certain conditions continue to exist in our society, which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity. And so, in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And if America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots repeatedly. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.”
—Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., from his “Other America” speech, Stanford University, 1967.
I painted this during Hurricane Katrina, which devasted the South, and New Orleans in particular, where my father’s family is from. I painted this for that year’s Miami Art Fair, as I wanted to make a work that was both iconic and a homage to this great man and leader, but also thinking about all the folks, especially POC, who were horribly affected, and neglected, by this tragedy and the government’s failure to respond quickly and appropriately. Thinking of the Woody Allen Hannah and Her Sisters quote, “If Jesus came back and saw what was being done in his name, he’d never stop throwing up,” I thought if MLK saw what had happened to people during Katrina, he would never stop crying.
Black Rhino was painted for a show in LA for Kim Light’s Lightbox gallery. It was the beginning if the campaign and debates for Barack Obama vs. John McCain, and the show was entitled Good Leaders, Endangered Species, Ships at Sea (a “chapter” of the über My American Dream meta-narrative). I felt we needed good leaders, because they were like an endangered species, in a world that was a ship at sea…
I had in the show cultural and civil rights leaders like MLK and his family, along with maritime pictures of ships that survived torrid storms, and pictures like this, of endangered species. I thought that no matter what your politics, that even conservatives could agree that we need these precious animals to survive the generations, and therefore care for our planet, global warming, clean air, and water and, with that, caring for all the peoples together on this great earth.
This feels like a mother rhino to me, her great elephantine-like skin is broken and bruised, yet she keeps clamoring on, never giving up the fight, her horn morphing into a foreshortened abstraction, like a magical pachyderm unicorn, stridently exalted for survival, no matter what the cost.
I grew up in Colorado, and my access to art was really through comics, and of course I loved Spiderman. I have taught comics at the School of Visual Arts since the early ’90’s (after publishing an acclaimed graphic novel Horror Hospital Unplugged, along with the writer Dennis Cooper), and I am the “Cartooning Coordinator” at SVA. In some ways, I see myself as an “avant-garde cartoonist” as many of my exhibitions are a series of juxtaposed images in a deliberate sequence that tell (albeit, and open-ended, nonlinear) stories. “Spiderman on the Roof” was originally in the Hamlet 1999 exhibition, in 2004, and there was like a Hamlet, trying to save the world as best as he could, specifically in juxtaposition to the King Kong painting next to it here (retaining a similar relationship from the Hamlet show). We lived in Soho at the time of 9/11, and saw the World Trade Center buildings with the holes in the side and the people inside, and witnessed (with my drawing students from NYU!) the collapse of both the buildings. It was all I can do to make this series of paintings near that time… I enjoyed the 2002 Sam Raimi/Tobey Maguire Spiderman film, and thought that this image of him would be perfect for “Rotoscoping” a Spiderman that was filled with real life and intrigue, fueled by my looking at the film still and thinking my thoughts about the last two years of New York, post 9/11, and wishing I could have done more to save the people in the towers, and the subsequent issues arising from the event—I was empowered, in that I had my health and acumen as an artist and a teacher, but of course the world events were hugely beyond any one person’s ability to make amends like a superhero.
The power of masked heroes, to paraphrase Scott McCloud’s famous “Understanding Comics” book, is the power of the icon. When Peter Parker is just Peter Parker he could be the kid next to you in the high school chemistry class—just another geeky kid. But when he dons his mask as Spiderman, he is red, with giant alien-eyes—he could be anyone. My theory on Spiderman is perhaps as a child you are reading a Spiderman comic in your bedroom with a flashlight, and maybe your parents are fighting in the other room—you can’t do much about your parents, but as you relate to the character in the comic, when he has his mask on he could be you—and you suture into the avatar of Spiderman, and as he thwarts evil, so do you! When I’m painting this or many of my works, I find myself transcending into the character and scene that I’m depicting, much in the same way you do when playing a video game or reading (or creating!) a comic, and I think I did so here, becoming Spiderman as I’m painting him, being in that space of that world to try to make it a better place. Specifically placed here in this installation, I see him trying to help King Kong who has already fallen, and Spiderman’s frustration that he couldn’t do more to help..
Inspiration. I still want to make a painting of the first appearance of Spiderman on the cover of Amazing Fantasy 15, from 1962. Originally a character created by Steve Ditko and Stan Lee, the cover was actually penciled by Marvel giant Jack Kirby, and inked by Ditko, as many mainstream superhero comics were and still are group efforts. Ditko was inspiring to Mike Kelley for his eccentric characters and drawing—he still lives, but is a libertarian recluse, self-publishing ranting comics about society, and in his earlier, slightly more sane days, he was able to propel life into his characters by channeling all of his conscious and unconscious ideas into his work, grounded by Stan Lee and his business and creative canny sensibilities. Kirby was also an amazing artist, able to create formal nuance, that if you turn his pages sideways to abstract them, and squint your eyes, they sometimes can create Pollock paintings from his amazing use of darks and lights, and his “Kirby Krackle” of positive and negative space. These are images that are fused with feeling, not about Duchamp/Warhol/Lichtenstein maneuvers of high and low, but more in the Guston/Saul tradition of identifying and “becoming” as you render the iconic avatar. One of my longtime favorite paintings at the Frick is The Polish Rider, allegedly by Rembrandt (although this has been contested). I still think it must be by the master, as the emotions and the mystery is so great in this painting, and whether or not he painted it (or if he had help by his pupil) doesn’t matter to me, as the Romantic intensity is so pervasive in this work. I think its an ideal idealized hero, the youth on horseback, on an adventure through a murky landscape, him standing out from the golden hues of the gravy-like colors of the background, on some mission for truth and justice it seems, or acknowledging with “great power comes great responsibility,” something I was trying to convey in the tentative leap to heroism of our contemporary hero.
This diptych originally appeared in my Hamlet 1999 show, but also reappeared in my Good Leaders, Endangered Species show at Broadway Windows in 2010. Originally Lennon was like Hamlet’s fathers Ghost, seeking redemption and guiding Hamlet, but always too this was an image of two great artists, and the cover (and inside image of Lennon’s fingers configuring the Peace Sign) of one of my favorite albums of all time. Of course John was always a great artist, but I feel that Yoko really taught him what art was about, and post Beatles, they were making a kind of Post Post Modernism together, singing about their own lives with such passion and musical beauty and fervency, that it caused us all to care and relate our own stories onto theirs. Like Manet, who painted those around him with such intelligence and formal finesse that his personal story was political, but had room for beauty and painterly trancendence, in this album, and all subsequent to it, John and Yoko made music of their lives that we all could relate to and love. Yoko of course was a great artist in her own right before she met John, and I love her work that has such openness and optimisum that although it is highly conceptual, many can be moved and think and feel about the ideas she projects so poetically. And of course the Beatles changed culture, no small feat, but did so with the power of Love that helped to drive the music and make it relevant today. All of this extended throughout their careers, but in this album, which is so personal, I find it evocative and moving on every level, and it has taught me how to make work from my own life and hopefully make it relevant as much as any master painter. I love that the Bed In for Peace is one of the best performance pieces to be remembered for generations (and which gave us the "Give Peace a Chance" anthem), and their "War is Over (if you want it)" is one of the great conceptual pieces of all time. I’ve always kept this diptych around me to remind me of what is important for its feng-shui great energy. Their relationship was so pioneering being of mixed race and equal power (and how they defended their relationship and partnership to the world was so moving) and it also reminds me of how to be a great husband to my husband Andrew Madrid, the love of my life.
I have always loved Louise Bourgeois and her work. My second job after college was working the front desk at Robert Miller Gallery, in the late 80’s, when they were uptown on 57th street in the Fuller Building, Cheim and Read were the directors, and they represented Louise. She would come in with her assistant Jerry Gorovoy, and I would have conversations with them, especially during a time when she was in a Who’s Who directory, which she took very seriously, and I sat down with her (and talked with her on the phone) about the exacting detail of her pages of career. I was always impressed with her being a great “long distance runner”: I always tell students that to be a great artist, you always have to best the best thing you have ever done, and keep doing this until you get really old and then you can ice cream and die like Louise Bourgeois”!
Of course, Louise kept making incredible work all of her life, always challenging herself and what she could do (I’m not sure she ever settled for ice cream!) until she passed away. Most importantly, for me, she is a great Post Post-modern master, as she made work that was always “about something” (and far more complex than of her famous nightmare of her father eating her, like Saturn eating his young, and/or based on her father’s affair with their maid, which is often what her work is essentialized into being about). I believe she began each work with a motivational cue, thinking about her family and so on, but then allowed it to be a meditation about this and so many other things. Coming from surrealism and the great age of psychoanalysis, Freud and Jung, she also had a penchant for the unconscious, and at the same time had incredible formal skills, so the results of her sculptures and images were potent, both in how you could look at them for a long time, but also how you could think about them for a long time, too.
Psychoanalysts would say it was about the father, or psychoanalysis, feminists would say it was about feminism, and so on, and while I don’t think Louise ever intended her work to be about any or all of this specifically, their “noodles would stick on the cabinet” as they would all be right—the work is so rich that it, like all great work, means so many different things to different people and the interpretations hold up as the art itself is so complex and open-ended, but directed in form, content, and attitudinal gesture.
I used to bring my NYU students at the end of their senior year (usually on Easter Sunday!) to Louise’s salons, as a sort of baptism into the artworld. I felt that if you were in Paris during the latter years of Giacometti, you would visit him with plaster in his hair in his bohemian abode, and Louise’s world was like that for our time. She was a conduit between modernism and post-modernism, a bridge between the old New York School and now. She lived in a Chelsea Townhouse on 20th Street, and you could just call her up on the phone and ask her if you could come—she might make you sing her a song (!?) or something, but ultimately would say “come at 3 on Sunday” and hang up. And sometimes I would also just come on my own. Her place was old and somewhat disheveled, with yellowing reviews and posters on the bulletin board behind her, with the paint and plaster peeling, but you could tell she was well taken care of—there was never a spec of dust anywhere.
These afternoons were “exquisitely boring” in that they could last for hours—they would finally kick us out at about 7:00 in the evening, and people would become woozy drinking the aperitifs and warm alcohol and soda people would bring (in addition to chocolate, which Louise loved), and one by one you would come up to her little table and present your work to her. She always had an “Ed McMahon” to her “Johnny Carson”—sometimes it would be famous curators like Robert Storr, sometimes one of her sons, sometimes someone you never heard of, and the “salon” itself was populated by sometimes famous artists, sometimes janitors, sometimes curators and critics wanting to visit with her (she would make them come on Sundays occasionally if they wanted to consort with her). She sometimes made people cry—although I don’t think she was intentionally ever really “mean”, but could be dismissive if she didn’t “get” the work. But often she would engage—this was her way I think of continuing to teach, in addition to having contact with the outside creative world, and if she would exclaim “very good!” it would send you to the moon for a week! I loved having her approval, and would always be pensive and apprehensive in a good, excited way in bringing my work to her (and it was also my way of sharing my work with my students, whom I never discussed my work with usually).
She wanted the others to interact, although we seldom did, in the spirit of a “real salon”, as we were all hanging on her words and reactions. She was old, but her pilot light was still very much on—you could tell with the twinkle in her eye and her quick wit to respond to things—she really was engaged, although she would barely get to the table, navigating with her hands the counter, etc., to it (I don’t think she wanted people to see her use her walker), and sometimes, like in this picture, her housecoat could be stained and she didn’t always look great, but her bohemian self (I remember seeing her and Jerry at J and R once, in their long black coats, looking like they came from the 19 century in a 21 century technological world). But I don’t think she cared much—money, etc., didn’t mean much when she finally came into her own (although fame and respect did, I suppose!), and hopefully we don’t have to wait until the 70’s to finally get the recognition we deserve, but sometimes this helps?! In Louise’s case, I think when she did finally achieve status and wealth, the money didn’t mean much to her, and she just kept challenging herself to make great artworks, which I love too for their psychological meditation and dimension—I think she made work because it was the modus operandi of her life—she was a monk for art and this was her world and way of expressing herself and living, inseparable from her being in her day to day life.
I realized in painting this, a picture from my own photo that I asked her if I could take to paint a portrait from, that the world of her desk is really a cosmology of her work. From the Hugo Ball poster she designed (which serendipitously was also at the Whitney Biennial, reproduced almost exactly in the same place, if there was a laser beam from its placement to the Semiotexte wall where they put it in the wallpaper design of their installation), to the balls, mirrors, etc., that were reproduced hugely in her sculptures, to the red ink on the table, left over I suppose from her insomnia drawings. Also, when painting this, I realized her hands on the table resembled her famous marble sculptures with hands on rough surfaces, and her twisted housecoat resembles after the fact of painting it, in my mind, her hanging sculptural effigies.
After I painted the picture, I sent images of it to her studio, and they mentioned that she saw it and approved, to my great relief. I first exhibited the work in a show at Derek Eller entitled “Good Leaders, Endangered Species, Ships at Sea” as I felt she was a great leader and model for what a great artist should be, and a later incarnation of the exhibit (called Good Leaders, Endangered Species) that was installed at Broadway Windows, on 8th and Broadway as a part of NYU to the public. She died during the time of this exhibit, and I hope this ultimately was a respectful homage to this great lady and artist, who in the painting seems to be pointing to the beyond of the door, perhaps symbolizing the afterlife, where she is now immortal through her great works and legacy that will hopefully endure through the ages. I’m sure, too, that anyone who attended the salons will never forget their experience, being in the realm of this Post Post Modern Master.
Inspiration
Louise Bourgeois, Welcoming Hands, Paris
Louise Bourgeois, Tate Museum installation
Alice Neel is one of my favorite painters of all time, and I have always cherished the portrait she did of Warhol, post shooting, that exposed a real tenderness and vulnerability of t his great cool genius. I was thinking very specifically of this work when I was painting my picture of Louise—I think great portraits bring out the inner personality of the person they are portraying, and hope I was able to do this when painting Bourgeois, in the emulation of how Neel painted Warhol.
Alice Neel, Andy Warhol, 1970. Collection of the Whitney Museum.
From appropriating imagery to paint from, inspired by Post Modernism and the Pictures Generation, to appropriating film stills (inspired in part by Roland Barthes’ great text “the Third Meaning”), to appropriating from historical photos, I realized that the more I was able to get to the source of the image, to draw from it the emotive and atmospheric weight of the image, the more “real” the image was, the more rich incredible things I was able to perceive, feel, and paint from the image.
Although I’m not religious, per se, I’m a pretty spiritual person, and if there is one religion that makes sense to me, it would be Buddhism. A lot of my fellow Semiotics friends from Brown have become Buddhists! If part of Semiotics was about the power of language, how “language is the software that programs the hard drive of your brain and consciousness to perceive the world”, Buddhism is the ancient ideology of this—everything exists in the word that you see, but perhaps not in the way that you perceive it. I remember in a Semiotics class at Brown, I asked my professor Michael Silverman in a moment of nihilistic defeat, “if everything adds up to zero, what’s the point of it?” and Michael retorted “Well, it’s pretty interesting to talk about!”. Buddhism for me gives a deep spiritual component to all this…
I’ve seen the Dalai Lama speak on a number of occasions, and while he always starts out “cute” and “sounding like Yoda”, very quickly he gets very deep and complex into philosophy, and it’s almost impossible to keep writing notes and you have to give in and just listen very thoughtfully and carefully. By the third day of this teaching, few people had come back, and the feeling was very woozy and transcendent: it felt as if we were all on a giant spaceship taking off into another dimension, especially at this point where the Dalai Lama was deep into chanting prayer. If you believe Tibetan Buddhism, he is the reincarnation of the Chenrezig Buddha in the thangka painting behind him, and in fact, the whole scene started resembling the painting, with the video screens on either side of him like the small Buddha’s on clouds on either side, and the architecture of the hall like a giant mandala, and the lens flares (I like to paint all the aspects of the photo as if they were real!) like floating mandalas throughout the scene. I really wanted to capture the transcendent, ecstatic experience of being there, which was truly transformative, and listened to audio books of the Dalai Lama while painting this, along with many cd’s of Tibetan Buddhist prayers.
A Buddhist would say that a chair isn’t necessarily a chair, it’s “pieces of wood bolted together, etc., and if you stand on it, it’s a ladder!” and I use this analogy when teaching students about drawing and painting things “as they really are” to objectify what you are perceiving in a manner beyond language—when you are delineating negative space to perceive positive space you are literally reading “between the lines” and thinking “outside the box” of perceived ways of looking at things and learned language, which can really obstruct how you create visions of “reality”. When painting this, the interdependence of the elements really came across to me, in the micromanaging of positive and negative shapes, forms, color, etc. and it was a lengthy, but amazing experience that I hope gives the work a life of its own and emulates the experience. Fun fact, Richard Gere is the gentleman with the white hair and dark suit to the right of His Holiness, and at one point, the Tibetan institute contacted me about using the image, but never followed through! I hope that Hi Holiness might have seen this image (or the other images I have created of him and of the Karmapa!) and would have approved!
Inspiration
Edward Hopper and his wife used to go to the movies every day, and he was inspired for his work to create images that were like film stills, in addition to embracing the architecture of classic New York buildings and interiors, that have also inspired me so much.
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Edward Hopper, New York Movie, 1939, collection of the Museum of Modern Art, NY
This was for a show called Good Leaders, Endangered Species, Ships at Sea, because I feel like we need Good Leaders, as they are an Endangered Species, in a world (and America) that was like a Ship at Sea. This was true then, in the weaning years of the W. era and into the Obama, and even more now as I write this with the oncoming of fascism through America and the globe.
Of course, this is a polar bear on a melting iceberg, thinking of the good words of Al Gore and the images in his and other films and videos of their home territory getting lost at sea. I love to micromanage, and being a son of a psychoanalyst, having image fall apart into abstraction, an abstraction of a projected unconsciousness maps upon what you are observing, giving you pinpoints on which to map your dream worlds into a reality. Here, I’m hoping the icebergs break into a surreal moment of the unconscious, my thoughts and feelings projected onto dreamlike forms of other worlds, in a wintery post-apocalyptic haze of prophetic abstraction that I hope doesn’t become a reality. The bear’s berg itself to me looks kind of like a plane, a warship, another symbolic fate of doom. Hopefully the bear appeal reaches all of us, no matter what our political stripes, we all must agree to save nature and our wilderness, the flora and fauna upon the earth, the interconnectedness of everything before we break apart and melt into a melancholic ending of the Earth.
This is a picture of the great Marx Brothers in their masterpiece anti-war comedy as their characters hysterically celebrate a decision to go to war while in the background generals and politicians gesticulate frantically in dance (a vision originally created as Hitler, Franco and Mussolini—who banned the film—were rising to power. This film is both hilarious and disturbing and apocalyptic, in a scene that emulates American’s false claims to the UN that began the war in Iraq. While painting this, I listened to the Marx Brothers incredible films and radio broadcasts, I also listened to music recorded at the time, etc, as I did Groucho Marx’s letters while I painted him, and so on, to get a real "feeling" of them while I worked. Humor is very close to fine art—it usually is about the juxtaposition of two or more things that normally don’t go together going together to create a fissure—in this case, a celebratory dance and declaration of war. In all art, it recognizes that there is a breach between signified and signifier—what we are looking at, and how we traditionally are taught to understand what we are looking at. For Eisenstein, his idea of the "filmic" is when you see a picture of a field, but hear a sound of a boot, and your mind needs to negotiate that juxtaposition. Or he would say that Van Gogh painted "red trees"—trees aren’t usually red, but this was the poetry of Van Gogh. The Marx Brothers at their best were artful—they would, in a carnivalesque manner, throwing everything you think you know up in the air so you had to look at it anew—of course we usually don’t break into dance when going into war, but there is a strange excitement that charges the air—something very much felt around the country after our decision to go into war after 9-11, strategically set up to make us feel this way.
In Roland Barthes’ great essay "The Third Meaning," he discusses his ideas via Eisenstein film stills, who created movies inspired by painting, but also Walt Disney, who he felt made moving paintings. After communism went wrong, and he wanted to continue making movies in the Stalinist regime, he quietly subverted his supposed propaganda films to get by the censors and the government who funded his projects, but wanted his audience to critically think or upset how they would normally see when watching. For Barthes, the first meaning is literally what you see—in this case—the Marx Brothers wildly gesticulating in front of Germanic looking soldiers and officials. The second meaning for Barthes is what the artist was consciously thinking about when creating the work, the "obvious" symbolism—that you can read in an image, and "horizontal" reading of the scenes happening in time. In this case, I’m pretty sure the Marx Brothers, although they claimed this WASN’T an anti-war vehicle, were making fun of governments and people getting worked up over nothing, and creating real chaos and terror in the process of the testosterone-fueled energy dynamic of warring parties and nations, and the irony of this being like a wild dance. The Third Meaning for Barthes is the "vertical reading"—what an audience may bring to a work of art, what they gleam from watching something that perhaps was not intended by the director or the artist, but something that is provoked by the form and content of the art—the ineffable "something" that gives a work a life of its own in the eyes and mind of the viewer who brings their own closure to a piece by critically thinking about, while perhaps also emotionally being stirred or feeling what is conjured inside of them—but moved in a manner of how they think about how they are being moved, and importantly, why and how it may then serve to make them think for themselves about their life and world.
When painting this work, and all my works while looking at photos, the "third meaning" is intrinsic to my process. I use the photographic image as a talisman to project my own thoughts and associations, meanings and feelings, hoping that in the abstract notions of the picture plane, my unconscious will break into a subconsciously derived abstraction that will then induce a life among the viewer. I’ve been incredibly influenced by Cézanne and the Modernists, but before this, the Old Masters, and in this case, in particular, El Greco. El Greco was originally inspired and came out of Byzantine icon painting, where painters really felt that they were channeling something real when painting images of saints and holy figures—that painting them was like a direct communication with that entity that would come alive and speak to them through their brush, and then for the person praying, meditating, or otherwise regarding the image. Unlike many of the Old Masters who were relegated to the margins by not making things look "real" or "good" (the very reason they are now the Old Masters is that they painted in excess to the commission and brought their own vision to the "reality" before them), El Greco made a great career for himself as the particular sect of Catholicism valued the PASSION that he brought to his subject matter. Although his figures and forms looked like they got lost in Photoshop and couldn’t find their way out, the result was that, within the sinewy figures where the negative and positive space converge, there are strange and wonderful tableaus, and synaesthetic energy created that makes one FEEL the emotions that he wanted you to feel, while you THINK about what the subject matter was about for yourself—in his case, mostly religious. While obviously not a religious image, while painting this I was definitely thinking about the almost sublime absurdity of going into war, our current ones or almost any in history. While of course it is important to protect our nation and people, and defeat evil whenever necessary, so much of the time it really is of course about money, power, and ego, and so many lives are lost and so much tragedy occurs in this horrible history. While transferring the black and white image into color, while negotiating all the folds and forms and strange abstractions that happened in the micromanaged space in this image, I thought deep thoughts not only about the generous and amazing smart comedy generated by the Marx Brothers (and Groucho in particular) but about my own ethnic Jewish history (or half Jewish—my father is Jewish, my mother Southern Baptist which technically doesn’t make me a Jew but my sister is reform and changed her name to Chaya Rivka and it is cultural identity I feel the closest to), and how Jewish comedy has come through time and tragedy, the craziness of the Bush years, and my own life as an artist, wanting to entertain but make people think, too. And much much more—as of course the world was coming into holocaust when this film was being made, and being in the show "Good Leaders, Endangered Species, Ships at Sea," our own country at this time was headed into its own great depression.
My paintings aren’t photorealistic but "felt," I suppose, and I hope my unconscious spills out into them to give them life. I love modernity for the emotions and feelings works of that time can project, but also for their hegemonic formal nuances of light, color, and so on, and how they really could be "windows into other worlds," the subconscious. But I also revere post-modernity for its politics and content, for producing art that had everything to do with the culture surrounding it and how it reflected larger truths beyond the picture plane. I hope to embrace both sensibilities in my paintings and drawings. They might not look exactly like received images that we are accustomed to seeing, perhaps simply because I’m gay and choose subject matter that many might take seriously (I also believe people like Judy Garland, Elvis, and James Dean made a significant impact on our way of life and culture). Sometimes people don’t know how to read my work, but I hope this is part of its strength, and that, ultimately, people might bring to the image and their relationship to the iconic subject matter their own ideas and will "get it," its seriousness, in addition to my embrace of beauty and/or truth beyond surface representations.
One of the things I love about Michelangelo is his embracement for both the sacred and the profane, which I think is happening here in one of his earliest known works attributed to Michelangelo, as it closes resembles his attributed wooden crucifix that resides at the Santa Maria del Santo Spirito in Florence. I have done a few renderings of the other, trying to learn from the Master and also all the could be imparted by painting after this famous sculpture, and in this case also with the conceit that I could bring color to a black and white image of this fairly monochromatic sculpture, made out of Polychrome wood. After his mentor and patron Lorenzo de Medici died, Michelangelo was a guest at the Santa Maria convent when he was just seventeen, and could make anatomical studies of the corpses coming from their hospital, which inspired it seems both sculptures, as they are startling real, and anatomically correct, being "naked." Of course in our day we would say that Michelangelo was gay, as he had well-known relationships with other men, and as much as he may be creating a sacred image here, he also was in admiration of the nude male body, although obviously made with great care and taste and in accordance to the story of Christ and how he was bare in the original story. I thought in the image as if the background was fire or holy light, to which he hovers above with holy Stigmata in this painting which I also hope I could, following in the footsteps of the Master, help to breath new life.
This was for the first installment of Good Leaders, Endangered Species, Ships at Sea, at Lightbox gallery in Los Angeles in the spring of 2008. I hoped, with the campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama (along with John McCain!), that the poetry of the narrative allegory would resonate in that intense political climate, we needed “Good Leaders,” as they were like an “Endangered Species,” in a world and America that was a “Ship at Sea.”
James Dean has always been a hero for me. A gay man (or at the very least “Hollywood bisexual”!) Dean was sugar-daddied up on his way to fame—his many homosocial and homoerotic encounters and “friendships” are well documented and true. A great artist, Dean wanted to be a master, and be on the Mount Olympus of culture with Picasso and Michelangelo and more. He strove mightily, a true “hero’s journey,” as his mother died young, he was cast off by his hapless father to live with his cousins in Indiana, but knowing he didn’t fit in, worked intensely to get out—to Southern California to eventually go to UCLA for acting. This lasted a short while, as he began to get successful bit acting jobs, and on the recommendations (and connections) of his older male producing boyfriend, came to NYC, started acting in theater, Elia Kazan “discovered” him for East of Eden (which I believe the original photo is an outtake from), and the rest is history. In just a couple of years and three movies, James Dean changed culture, bringing his sensitivity and Method Acting ways to his roles, he was able to suture into his characters his own life spirit, a queer man who loved life, and like his hero The Little Prince, bringing about a new awareness of what it was like to be young, smart, confident yet questioning—also like Hamlet—to “wake” people from the everyday life of the super conservative ’50s to a new world.
Elvis was inspired by Dean, as was most of rock ‘n’ roll and the beginnings of the beatniks, hippies, and boomer generation. I don’t think I would be the same person without him and his influence, and I love trying to channel him, bringing my own life into his character like he did in his acting. Sometimes when I’m painting figures who have passed away, I feel in my latest night moments as if I’m like a medium, bringing into being a consciousness into the persona I’m portraying, and their essence comes through. The background here was flowers, but from a low angle with a high perspective, like the Japanese prints Van Gogh and Gauguin loved that inspired them to have high horizon lines (or none!) in their works.
The same is happening here, but also inspired by Shojo manga (Japanese comics for girls, that have emotive symbolic backgrounds behind characters to emulate aesthetically their emotions, also like the prints that came before them), I hope the flowers convey a synesthetic feeling. More than this, as I paint from material that may be out of focus in the original image (and in this case, from a black-and-white photo), how it’s not like the photo is what is “me” about it. in the abstraction of the out of focus imagery, I hope that by painting the distortions as if they are real, that my unconscious also spills out into my brush. If oil painting was created to make things look more “real” than any other medium, perhaps it can create dream space/time from our inner minds that also feels palatable and real. Not that I’m any medium, but if I’m channeling these characters, when their essence comes through, hypothetically maybe I could also paint a portal into the world from which the consciousness apparated from—in this case heaven? The Mount Olympus of James Dean’s dreams?
Whatever the case may be, like the watch face on his wrist, we are only on this mortal coil for a short while in the eons of existence, and better make the most out of what we have been given while our consciousness has the vehicles of our bodies in which to operate. James Dean did well with his very short time on Earth before he died at age twenty-four, I can only hope that I’ve been working as hard as I can and trying my very best to make art that might be able to tell stories for a culture to understand itself in order to progress (and teaching, and loving my husband, family, and friends, too!). Having Dean as an ultimate icon and idol (I’m working on his biography as a graphic novel to be published by Fantagraphics one day soon—and this image will be part of it!), I hope to make great art that will stand the test of time, with my spirit in the vehicle of the painting to speak positively to future worlds—perhaps like the flowers in the painting this is a romantic notion, but as Dean says in Rebel Without a Cause as his character Jett Rink, “You gotta do something. Don’t you?”
Tommy Kirk was a ’50s Disney child star, most known for his roles in the Shaggy Dog series, The Absent-Minded Professor, Old Yeller, The Misadventures of Merlin Jones, and this, Swiss Family Robinson. When these films came out, I wasn’t yet born, but would see the movies as rerun kid matinees and on television. There was always something about him and his roles that were different—it was the smart loner, kind of a romantic, gentle, but cool and different kid. When I was a kid, I don’t know if I had a crush on him, but I was attracted to him in a way I couldn’t really describe. I identified with his gentleman kid persona, and the movies were fun. As I got older, I realized he had been a gay actor—he was fired by Disney for making out with an extra outside the set and had another short-lived career later as an older teen/young man in “hip” cool beach movies, Mars Needs Women and more. Sadly, he got into drugs—it was hard and lonely for him to be gay and the time when this was still subjugated against, especially in the film business but also for his personal life. He ended up retiring from acting but had a successful carpet-cleaning business and retired to the wilderness on a nice pension.
I thought this image was cool, kind of like a David vs. Goliath. Even though he had a “kid next door” allure he was somehow always different, and in his roles, usually the loner, and/or made outcast from the core group, including family. In this image, although he is throwing a slingshot, I think to gather food for his family, it seemed like it was so primal, this queer kid in the jungle, throwing a slingshot to the giant of the humanity that tries to suppress and repress him. Tommy Kirk was always out and proud to be gay for his whole post-acting life and off drugs and a successful businessman. Although it might not have been the career he sought, at least he did it his own way and didn’t let it get him down but won in his personal life. I wonder about so many gay men of a different generation, we know the ones who survived as out gay people, but so many probably had sad lives of oppression.
This image represents to me a fighting back, a standing up for oneself, and promise for myself and other LGBTQ people of my generation can serve also as models for successful, queer, and happy individuals who don’t allow the system to bring it down, but to fight on and win.
This painting was from the first installment of the series "Good Leaders, Endangered Species, Ships at Sea," an installation juxtaposing in a deliberate sequence to create a poetic allegory of images, oil paintings of iconic figures from popular and political cultural history are exhibited along with images of animals that are truly endangered in our fragile ecology, next to pictures of vessels striving to overcome seemingly insurmountable storms, symbolizing an optimistic outlook that we can healthily triumph through the chaotic crises of our time.
In this work, Shirley Temple makes an appearance from the film The Little Princess as she dreams herself to be a benevolent leader as her character in the film makes a valiant struggle to overcome hardship. One of my husband’s and now my favorite films, Shirley Temple plays a character whose wealthy father leaves her a private school, only for her to lose everything when they believe the father, who went off to fight in a war, dies. She is then made to become a servant for the mean girls in the school, who treat her with contempt. Shirley Temple—being Shirley Temple—doesn’t make a fuss about their treatment of her, only wishes for the future, befriending the other servant girl at the school, and making constant visits to the Vet hospital to find her returning missing father, who she refuses to believe is dead. There is a terrific dream sequence, that this film still comes from, where she, playing a queen, protects the kind adults who protect and support her by admonishing the cruel school matron that subjugates her in real life, and is encouraged by the young couple’s love for one another—they save themselves by giving each other the kiss that the witchy matron accuses them of stealing. Shirley as queen then witnesses herself self-actualize, when she watches her doppelganger be the star of a little ballet. She wakes up to the benevolent mysterious neighbors gift of a warm breakfast and new clothes for she and her friend, which gives her the encouragement to continue to pursue her dreams, finding her father by the end of the film and getting to meet the Queen!
I love Shirley Temple, who in her real life was one of the most famous, wealthiest actors of her time as a child star, giving the nation and world hope through her bright spirit during the time of the depression, and later in life, becoming a benevolent Republican stateswoman, and one of the first celebrities to come out as having Breast Cancer, announcing it to the world and popularizing the idea to check and help cure the disease. She was a "Good Leader" in both her life and her art, and a model for many. Warhol always idolized her, and I’m surprised he didn’t make more images of her (if any?), and it was inspiring for me to paint her during our own recession, and she inspired hope in me as much as any audience member in her heyday.
This is an image of the “real” Karmapa, Ogyen Trinley Dorje, who was “discovered” by the current Dalai Lama, to be the head of the 900-year-old Karma Kagyu Lineage. After the Dalai Lama passes on, the Karmapa will be the leader of Tibetan Buddhism, perhaps the last, as China has succeeded in suppressing the Tibetan community and there may be no longer a true reincarnation of the Dalai Lama to be found by this Karmapa—in many ways, he is the end of the line of the Tibetan leadership, barring some miracle.
But His Holiness is a kind of a miracle. He was able to escape to his temporary home at Gyuto Monastery in India after being discovered in Tibet, in a trunk of a car—this is an image just after his successful escape, the scar on his cheek he got while hiding in the vehicle. He is also a poet, and a terrific artist, in addition to recording chants with super contemporary Radiohead-like instrumental backdrops that are truly moving and unusual.
I was able to see him live back in NYC when he visited there some years ago with my friend Lisa Kirk, who had gotten me into Buddhism. We used to go to meetings above the McDonald’s in an apartment on 2nd Avenue in the East Village, led by an appointed Dali Lama monk, a gentle man in saffron robes, who worked in a copy shop by day to get by (I will always remember and be grateful for the color xerox packet he made for me, which I also made at least one painting of the Chenrezig Buddha). I really got into it for a while, doing the chants at home, and in my mind walking through the streets of NYC on my way to teach and more. I still do some of the mantras today and believe in them as they work. I did feel after a while, however, that it was someone else’s religion, feeling it was too remote of a culture that while I totally respected, I didn’t feel I could do the depth of time to fully immerse myself in with respect to feel right (my dad made me give back my Webolos’ pin after I missed too many meetings after the Cub Scouts because I couldn’t go to all the meetings). Buddhism though seems a bit like semiotics, which I studied back at Brown, where everything exists but just in the way you perceive it, you become critical of your consciousness. In semiotics, this could be cerebral and about language. But it also points to politics, and gender identity constructs given a capitalistic, phallocentric language, and so on. With Buddhism, there seems a spiritual component that comes along with realizing your objectivity in the universe—that you are one of many, and the interconnectedness of all things comes into play and therefore a mind/body experience of self-awareness, the knowing but also the unknowing of things.
I love Buddhism, it has taught me a lot, and I’m still a fan and a casual, in thoughtful, self-critical ways, a fellow traveler. It got me through much, and I still try to be mindful today in my thoughts and actions, teaching with compassion and empathy literally in my role as professor at USC, but hopefully also in my life and art.
I painted this work for a show called Good Leaders, Endangered Species, Ships at Sea, the idea was that, in the W. waning years right before Obama, we were in desperate need for Good Leaders, who were like an Endangered Species, in a world that was like a Ship at Sea. I felt optimistically that no matter what your political denomination, hopefully you love animals, and especially those that are endangered, like this tiger. Tigers need a lot of space to roam, and that is diminishing drastically, there are only a little over 3,000 living in the wild today, so sad.
Tigers are so sleek and beautiful, and even though in fiction like The Jungle Book, tigers can be portrayed as malevolent, I think they are anything but—they are heroes. Feminine mystique, like my love for all cats, there is something about a tiger that is so seductive and withholding, yet powerful and a force. Here, between blades of grass, she seems to be pensively looking, camouflaged, into what I hope breaks into a kind of surreal pick-it-stick surreality of a dream world, like angels protecting one of the great queens of the planet.