Hamlet 1999, Part 3

This was based on an old black and white film still of Lawrence Olivier in his great film version of Hamlet. I love the text by Roland Barthes entitled the "Third Meaning" when he looks at "reading" film stills of Eisenstein movies, most notably Ivan the Terrible. The first meaning for Barthes is literally what is happening in the scene, how you would describe it, the second meaning is what it symbolically probably ("obviously") means for the director, the "third meaning," what for him he also calls the "vertical reading" is what the viewer brings to the still that perhaps wasn’t intended for the artist. This could be feelings, moods, synaesthetic memories, relationships between the image and the viewer’s own life. When I’m painting from film stills like these, or any photos, I am playing music or audiobooks that mean something to the content of the image, thinking about my thoughts, relating to the image the way a method actor relates to a character by projecting my own life onto the subject, and letting the person portrayed (if their is a person) be an avatar for myself. Picasso said if you paint copies of the Old Masters, how it’s not like the Old Masters is what is "you" about it. When painting this picture of Olivier (who was also gay, or at least "Hollywood bisexual," FYI, in addition to being one of the world’s great actors), I was thinking of my recent travails but also the character of Hamlet reacting to his world (our cabin home in Riverside is also in Lake Elsinore, named after Hamlet’s hamlet), and my reacting to the world of Bush and his new administration, and patriarchy in general. At this time in my career I would paint until the mood or muse would leave me and then leave the painting along—there is a lot of fervent unconscious rendering in the negative space that gives this painting its internal energy. Perhaps this was my melancholic mood of the period that resulted in the emotional tone this palate projects, hopefully ultimately a positive romantic feeling of what it is to be a critically thinking, hopefully romantically optimistic artist or character in our world then and today. I’m proud that my long-ago former TA at the Museum School Ridley Howard once appropriated this image, and inserted it into a painting he created of his artist wife Holly Coulis flipping an egg, cooking in the nude!

Michelangelo Jesus is a work also from the Hamlet period, when I was working in a tiny space in our tiny apartment in Soho, living with Andrew and also our German Shepherd Julian and poodle puppy Rosa. I was hoping to transcend our environment at that time by painting my way through it for salvation. My father’s Jewish and my mother’s Southern Baptist so I grew up a religious mutt—I don’t think I’m religious (although I have an affinity to all and respect all), but do consider myself spiritual, with my ultimate spirituality coming through in my experience with art. I love Michelangelo for his embracement for both the sacred and the profane, and of course he was a powerful homosexual artist in his time that changed culture. As an artist he is unsurpassed, his sculptures and painting truly bring about an experience of the sublime, and I feel I have so much to learn from him. If you could take the cultural relevance of a Warhol (or even of Michelangelo of his day) and mix it with the formal amazing attributes of Michelangelo (and his transcendent feeling) you would really have something amazing. This was a painting from a photo of one of Michelangelo’s first known sculptures—a wooden crucifix that is in Florence. I love the mood and melancholy of Christ’s face in this, and tried to capture it by painting the image. I also love El Greco and Byzantine Icon painting, and one of the reasons those pictures seem so alive is that those painters really believed they were alive while painting them, and that they (and the believers who followed them by praying to the icon) were actually communicating, channeling the characters that were portrayed. Although I don’t necessarily consider myself religious, I was getting the most I could out of painting this picture, playing relevant music (my relationship to Catholicism was originally Jesus Christ Superstar, and I’m sure I was playing this while painting), and hoping through the act of painting, which really is a sort of meditative prayer, that I would gain salvation. We kept this picture close to us wherever we have lived—like many Catholic people who have a photo of the same sculpture in their environments, it projects positive energy for us, and contains so much of what I believe to be the power of art.

We witnessed the 9-11 tragedy and the fall of the two towers—outside our Soho apartment I stood on Thompson and Prince street after hearing the plane fly overhead and seeing it on the news and saw the hole with the people in it clearly in the building, and then went on my way to work at NYU, where I was to teach my freshmen drawing class "composition via the gag cartoon." Everyone was in a tremendous state of shock, and I certainly didn’t feel like teaching gag cartoons, so mentioned that "art wasn’t therapy, but I don’t what else to do but to go to Washington Square Park and draw this in order to try to understand it." We got there, and as soon as the students began to open their books and sketch, the first tower fell. The adults in the park began to cry and scream—my kids were great got up to hug and console them—I told the students that "class was cancelled" and to go home and call their parents to let them know they were alright. I’ve written about more of this with the other 9-11 works I have created, but I continued to think of all the people who died in the towers that day, and all the people jumping and falling to their deaths, and was traumatized by nightmares. At the time, my father was in town and saved the newspapers and said I should paint the photos of them—which I did do years later after continuing to have the nightmares—but during this time I could only deal with it by painting through allegory. Vertigo, the classic Hitchcock movie has these intense scenes of everyman Jimmy Stuart hanging on for his life on the precipice of a building with a blissed-out background, and reminded me of what it must have been like for those people who were the victims of this horrible tragedy. I painted this thinking of them, of their anguish, wanting to have empathy and compassion for them, their feelings, and all they lost on the brink of their fall. This was a tough painting to do, but helped me through this torment that I was experiencing, where hopefully I could suture into the avatar of Stewart portraying his psychological event, and purge myself of my feelings by channeling through him and this scene. Of course the great thing about the actual movie is that Stewart survives, and it his heroic being that helps him survive, and his courageous ability to face his fears and win in the end. Ultimately all those people were heroes who were in the towers, not just the amazing police and firemen who raced at the expense of their own lives to save them, but also the people in the buildings, who jumped to their death rather than getting burned alive or worse. It’s the courage of humanity, our ability to survive at all costs, to do our most to be our best while at the same time hopefully helping others and the world that gives me hope, something that I wish this painting might embue—not just tragedy, but the courage and strength of a hero.

I used to have a nightmare of a giant skull man walking down stairs when I was a small child, and when I finally saw Phantom of the Opera as an adult, there is the famous color sequence where the Phantom, in his Red Death costume, comes down the stairs in the Masque of the Red Death costume for the Masquerade Ball scene, and I realized that this must have been something I had seen as a kid which entered into my subconscious. I’m a big believer when you are doing any kind of dream art to think about the dream why you are executing it as then sometimes it opens up "portholes" in your unconscious, and you start remembering other aspects of the dream which can be illuminating and also infuse your work with a synaesthetic other life. Also, when working with nightmare imagery, by making work about it you objectify it, you "own it." Being a son of a psychoanalyst, I believe it gives you a method in which to understand what it was that plagued you in the first place. I’m also a big fan of Goya, who in his figurative narrative work was able to create allegories that have stood the test of time, and also create atmospheres that you really can feel and are palatable, that get under your skin better than any horror movie as they use both form and content to reach an inner mythos that could be intrinsic in all of humanity, through the power of the plasticity of oil paint to make not only things, people, and scenes concretized and realized within the picture plane, but also thoughts and feelings (and of course in his prints and drawings his inky blacks and scratchy sketching also lends towards emotive melancholic tones). In fact, it was seeing his Black Paintings at the Prado when I was in high school that made me want to create fine art, and to even see a relationship between the "danse macabre" of his imagery and my own fascination with monsters and science fiction growing up.

In this earlier work of this show—this was really part of the Hamlet 1999 series—and in that context, I was thinking of the Phantom as representing George W. Bush as he was leading us into war, or in a more universal context, the Shakespearian Claudius, a dubious leader, and his followers all too happy to lead to a world of destruction. Picasso said a painter paints to unload themselves, and I did that here using the subject matter to think about my anxieties towards this scene as a youngster, and how real it still seemed to be in maturity, where darkness and death can lure around any corner, and in the negative space, and cracks and folds of conscious representation of my painterly brush. The sleep of reason produces monsters, and so it is when bringing up imagery when thinking about your thoughts, allowing your unconscious seep through your paint along with your conscious control. Here, he represents, in my evocation of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, a devil, or THE devil, leading the damned to a dower inferno.

Like Blueboy, this painting was created in my NYU studio, when I had returned to NYC to forge a place for my husband and I to live again. It was a lonely time, and using magazine images to cull feelings and subject matter this work emerged, lost in listening to Radiohead, which felt right at that moment. This work has lived on my walls for years, reminding me of that moment, yearning for a better future and hoping through determination and hard work that both my art and career could fruitfully continue with a belief in self and the romantic longing for better days.