Heroes

Part of me wanted to start painting these Judy Garland paintings because it was one of those things where a lot of older gay men love Judy when a lot of younger gay men, or younger people in general, are terrified of her or don’t know who she is or something… When a reporter does a story about a cult and then becomes a member I sort of became a member in just finding what it was about Judy Garland that used to appeal to everybody. By painting her it was terrifying…

She had such a sorted life… She was such an empowered person, and really incredibly talented… You see any movie of her, she completely just glows right off the screen, and she’s fantastic. You know, she would make comeback after comeback after comeback…

Everything is allegorical. I am using these people as vehicles to talk about different ideas that I have. The was the theme of the show I initially painted this work was for a show called "Heroes," and for me Judy Garland is a hero…

Post-Modernism, I think if I could put it into a nutshell, it’s about agency being reified into Capital … It’s like agency, our spirit, our soul, our position as individuals reified—like flour into pizza dough, being folded into Capital… I feel we live in a Corporate Commodity Culture now where a lot of our ideas are decided and contained by committee. Somebody like Judy Garland or Elvis, who is almost like the brother of Judy Garland, in a way, were these people had incredible talent, were incredibly skilled…

I’m talking about the past in order to hopefully forge a place for the future…I always think that (I teach a lot and I love it ) and I feel it’s the job of an artist in a way to be a teacher, and I feel like these were people who were these living entities that were true geniuses that were able to be within the popular culture, and that, you know, there was a reason for them being there…

Joseph Campbell’s idea of an artist was that artist was supposed to tell stories for a culture to understand itself in order to progress… I feel that these people were like that, they were artists who were really trying to do something, but to do it within a popular vein, in order to reach the most amount of people. To move them, to have them experience something, to maybe have them think about their life a little better, to think about the world in which we live. And yet, the tragedy… So much about being a hero is about the giving over of oneself, in a way… I don’t think you have to suffer to be a good artist, I don’t think that, but…
(excerpted from a interview with Ross Bleckner in 2006 for show catalog)

Scott McCloud, in his incredible book Understanding Comics talked about the power of the icon, and closure. Closure is about putting two different elements together to create content… The power of the icon is that it is an essentialized form that people can relate to—a picture with a thousand words. When I’m painting a famous person, I’m hoping I’m able to make a great portrait of scene that has the productive baggage of what they can mean metaphorically as icons—while not like a "smiley face" icon that people can suture into and become, they are figures that have a common point of reference. In thinking about how they relate to the person and scene, and then the theme or narrative I am employing the subject matter for, I hope the viewer creates the closure of what this might mean, how it all fits together, in their own mind to create dynamic meaning and feeling that they will remember in this artful moment.

For Elvis, it was amazing for me to see his famous comeback special, where for the first time I realized this was a real human being that, despite the politics, really helped to change culture. When you look at his early appearances on television, you see an incredible young man who had this impassioned energy to help create rock n’ roll, and to take all he learned from African American culture—this is the colonizing politics, unfortunately—and marry it with the hillbilly music he also loved, to help come up with something new—building of the great work from the black performers he revered (again, part of the politics). But if you like Elvis, you like to think he acknowledged that history and influence, and continued, as "white trash from across the tracks" to commiserate with the outsider, beyond a patriarchal phallocentric power structure, helping to promote what his idol, the gay man James Dean, began, to give a voice to a youth culture and to change attitudes and the world.

When I do Elvis, I play Elvis all the time, or watch Elvis movies. It would drive Andrew my boyfriend crazy a little bit because there would be Elvis on all the time in the house, and then when I would take breaks I’d be watching Elvis. I’m trying to get underneath what it’s about. And then also, I’m consciously thinking about Warhol and people like that. I feel like painting Elvis is a weird, you know… Warhol did Elvis too, and in some ways, I feel like Warhol really loved the figures that he was painting.

If Warhol is constantly repeating Elvis over and over again, it’s not who Elvis was as a talent, what happens is the risk of that redundancy that we lose who they are as people or we forget their history. Elvis is a fat joke now. I don’t think for Warhol it was about Elvis as a person, or "Elvis the Incredible Talent We Loved," it was about our reception of Warhol, and also what you’re saying too, to make it more humble by reducing it. What I think for me is important, is to bring back who they were as people, and like any portraitist, try to essentialize what it was about them that made them so great. (From an interview with Ross Bleckner, 2005)

When I made this painting, which was from a photo of Elvis as a young man as its source image, I listened to all of Elvis’s extensive oeuvre, from his early Sun Sessions recordings to his last 70’s Las Vegas concert appearances. What was uncanny to me is in the end, he resembles an older Elvis in a young man’s profile—but his lambchops appear and he looks like he is weary and wary of the world, but still a great king.

We had a great friend of ours pass away in the fall. Our friend Alicia. She was Andrew’s, my boyfriend, best friend growing up. And she got sick and died at age 38. And she went to the hospital, and they were like, "not only do you have pneumonia, but you have full-blown AIDS," and she died within a week. And so it was this horrible tragedy, and it totally upset us. Isn’t that horrible? But she lived in Orange County, they just don’t’ have the information out there. People with AIDS are treated a little bit like lepers. And it’s horrible. She didn’t have good models. We tried to help her. She was always a high-strung character. And she was pretty wild. In Orange County there are a people are sort of in a somnolescent sleep and it’s sad. It’s not about critical thinking. I think that’s why art is important, hopefully it induces people to think for themselves.

One way that I really understood portraiture was the movie Rembrandt, with Charles Laughton as Rembrandt. It was this great black and white movie, from I think 1936, or something like that, and it has all these guys with moustaches out to here, and they’re walking across these snowy-white landscapes with windmills, a beautiful movie. But after Rembrandt is exiled out to Rembrandt land, because he was painting people too realistically, or he did the Night Watch, which challenges composition and so on, there’s this great scene in the movie where he hires a bum to paint him because he couldn’t afford real models. And the bum is dressed as Kind Sol, or King Solomon in this scene, and he turns to Rembrandt, or Charles Laughton dressed as Rembrandt, and he says "why are you painting me, I’m just a bum!" And Charles Laughton says, "you’re not a bum, you’re dressed as King Sol, and this is what it means to me…" And then he goes on this whole teary-eyed soliloquy of "Vanity of vanities, everything is vanity, " all this stuff, that he says. And I realized, "Oh my gosh! Really good portraiture, or figurative painting, is like method acting in a way… That he set up an allegorical situation that means something to him that he thinks about it while he’s painting it. And even though we don’t really understand who those characters are or those people who he painted—we don’t know who they are—we still care about the figures in the work, and the synaesthetic feeling that the real Rembrandt is bringing to the portrait in his painting. You feel it. You feel the emotion. You feel the care. You feel the pathos. Maybe the ineffable thing that you can’t put into words.

If I stand in front of Rembrandt or a Vermeer or an El Greco or a Velázquez, I don’t really care about who the people are in the paintings… When you find out more, it informs your ideas about the pictures, but ultimately its really about you having an experience in front of this thing and it moves you, maybe, hopefully, in a way you can’t put into words. And maybe, if you’re really lucky, it gives you an epiphany about life., or yourself, or your being within the world. I don’t’ know for my work, but this is something to aspire for…

Post-modernism is important as a movement because it made you step away from the work of art seeing how it operated in a larger system… It was all about looking as a language, and the received way of looking at things as constructed by ideology… You can’t control the way a viewer will receive a work…That the key is that you are always stepping back from the work of art, you’re stepping back from how we see things so you can see something that’s new! To hopefully, make changes, or to make progress, or to keep the discourse going, or to essentialize what is happening…

Modernism for me in a nutshell is that "It’s not the subject matter that’s important its what you bring to the subject matter that’s important." When Van Gogh paints the flowers, its not the flowers is about how he paints the flowers… For Cézanne, obviously, it’s not about the landscape, it’s about what he perceives, or maps onto that landscape. For me, Post-modernism is stepping back from a work of art and seeing how it operates in a larger system. There’s not one truth, there’s a multiplicity of truths, and there are no hierarchy’s, everything is subjective…

I think you can have your cake and it, too… I think a lot of post-modernism broke down the aesthetic nature of things. Or took away beauty. They want to take all the seductive agents, especially with painting away so you can get to the "core," as a philosophical, and political action. I want to make work that relates to the world outside of itself, but also have an inner emotion and ineffable "life of its own."

When I do Elvis, I play Elvis all the time, or watch Elvis movies. When I painted this work, I was thinking of him, how he moved, how he helped to change music, but I was also thinking about our friend Alicia, and trying to paint through those emotions for release from our anguish. Picasso said a painter paints to unload themselves—when they go to the forest of Fontainebleau and get filled with a green feeling then go back and spill out the green into their canvas. I was listening and trying to channel Elvis, but also spill out what I felt about Alicia, and all the emotions surrounding her death, to achieve a sort of catharsis. I was projecting onto the icon of Elvis, sort of suturing into him, while at the same time using him as a vehicle for these very personal emotions, to help me through this period, but also to make a work that was relevant not only to me but for the world.
(excerpted from an interview with Ross Bleckner for show catalog, 2006)

I have painted and drawn many images of James Dean throughout my life and career, and this painting came from the Heroes series, the foundation of the body of work that grew to be My American Dream—this is a seminal work. Dean was infamously gay or at least “Hollywood Bisexual,” and although his character was steaming for Elizabeth Taylor in this, perhaps the best of the three movies made in Dean’s lifetime, he also has a homosocial rivalry with (infamously gay) Rock Hudson, in addition to being a rogue who defies the symbolic order of patriarchy and class. I also love the movie Querelle, by Rainer Werner Fassbinder based on Genet’s book, where the Hollywood musical becomes transformed into a homoerotic set with sailors in the Gene Kelly roles.

This image reminds me of that, with Dean looking on as a cowboy sings his country blues in the background, with Dean in a sultry, and still masculine (or nonbinary?) idea of masculinity, portraying the cowboy that embodies Dean’s true pioneering spirit. He wanted to be on the Mount Olympus of culture with Picasso and Michelangelo and the rest, and in his three movies he achieved this, being one of the first to give a rebel voice to a youth culture, helping to create rock ‘n’ roll with his inspiration to Elvis and John Lennon and more, and giving all a sense of agency while instrumentally questioning and bringing a critical eye to power.

This is one of the few paintings that snuck into this show from an earlier body of work, Hamlet 1999. In that series, John Lennon represented the Ghost of Hamlet, his father back from the dead seeking revenge for his death from Hamlet’s uncle, and also to act as a sort of "Obi Wan Kenobi" to help set his guiding principals of life. Of course this is from the cover of Lennon’s fantastic Imagine album, from a Polaroid taken by Andy Warhol, where the effect of taking his image through the window with the clouds has already the feeling of a mournful transcendence.

I was having many dreams of the people falling from the Towers of the World Trade Center after witnessing the horrific events of 9-11. Being a huge John Lennon fan, I would call out them in my sleep "All You Need is Love!" and finally, in homage to them and to remember the tragedy and my feelings about it, created the painting now owned by the Whitney Museum to the left of this image. I’m hoping by the placement here that it depicts a sensation of what I was feeling in those dreams, as if the smoke of the 9-11 painting becomes a cloud in this work, as Lennon too arises from the earlier painting below him, as a young man in Rubber Soul (and adjacent to the appropriation of Bobby Kennedy by Roy Lichtenstein).

I feel that if you could have the populist notions of Warhol, making work of people and images that relate to the outer world, but coupled with the feelings, and painterly emotion of a Rembrandt, perhaps you could have something new. Certainly this is what I’m thinking of here, when I created this image while playing his music, the soul of Lennon coming alive through his music, being felt by my brush.

Gregory Peck has always been a hero of mine, and I created this work for a show called Heroes, that was in Brussels around the time of my 40th birthday, where I wanted to assemble the heroes of primarily American culture to show the world at large what was great about these people gathered together to serve as models. I grew up with Peck on TV in the many heroic roles he played, obviously and especially that of Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird. Even though, with the recent release of the Harper Lee "sequel" reveals the character to be perhaps less than stellar, the Atticus of the film that Peck inhabited was the bastion of integrity in his small town of Maycomb Alabama, defending a black man in a very racist 1930’s, and to treat people fairly, turn the other cheek, and to stand for what you believe. Certainly watching this film when it was repeated on television growing up had a huge affect on me, and seeing Peck in roles like in the Yearling and more gave me models, beyond those of my own great father and family and community, what it was like to be a "gentleman" and a positive idea of masculinity in the world. I was particularly attracted, to, to this particular image, as it seems that Peck is wearing a flannel shirt, in an environment that synaesthetically reminded me of the Colorado I grew up in—you could almost smell the fresh clean mountain air that was crisp enough to make you wear the humble and warm flannel shirt. I’m a big believer in Joseph Campbell, who, to paraphrase, mentioned that "an artist’s job is to tell stories for a culture to understand itself in order for that culture to progress" and Peck chose roles throughout his career, beyond Atticus, in particular because he thought they were proper role models in great material—of course he played some "baddies" too for range, but he is a consummate performer and man—outspoken against the blacklisting that happened in Hollywood during the McCarthy era, against the Vietnam war, and used his power of integrity to back the Democratic and liberal issues of his and our time fearlessly. He was a great artist because of all this, perhaps putting his work in his life and his life in his work made his acting even better and our world better as much as an artist can be of some influence. And he was always handsome!

“All we are saying, is give peace a chance.”

In celebration of Lennon, and because we need their message today more than ever, here is this work, appropriated from my husband’s sepia-toned poster that said “double fantasy” in the middle, given to him by his best friend Alicia, now sadly passed from AIDS-related causes many moons ago …

This is one of the best performances/art happenings ever by two of the greatest twentieth-century artists. It is wonderful that it is also one of the best known still after decades, and the result of which in part is the song “Give Peace a Chance,” still chanted at progressive rallies and marches the world over. This was the inception of the original recording, on May 26, 1969, led by Yoko and John, with accompaniment of hip comedian and variety show host Tommy Smothers, and sung along by a bedroom full of reporters, supporters, and activists such as psychedelic pioneers and rebels Rosemary and Timothy Leary (in front), Allen Ginsberg and more … They were on the second leg of the performance, which began in Amsterdam and continued here in a hotel room in Montreal.

To celebrate their wedding and their relationship, they invited journalists and guests, not to watch their lovemaking as many expected, but to come and talk about peace and politics, making “controversial” headlines around the world, and conversations, broadcast to millions, including the notorious interview with L’il Abner cartoonist and conservative pundit Al Capp.

Both Yoko and John are incredible artists, and I hope this work captures some of the raucous but transcendent spirit of this event, in addition to the love and shared spirit of our dear friend Alicia. Yoko, I think really taught John about being an artist, and his work so evolved in their collaborations together. Yoko still rocks the house today in vital avant-garde ways that are open and compassionate—her retrospective at MoMA was outstanding, and we’ll never forget seeing her perform live with son Sean many moons ago with Bill Arning in Central Park.

Hopefully we’ll survive the nightmare of rising fascism and celebrate on the other side a new renaissance and peace!

I had a show in Brussels, at the same time as my fortieth birthday back in 2006, called Heroes, really one of the first shows of the My American Dream body of work. For the show, I wanted to concentrate on the great cultural heroes that inspired me, who created great works but also who as people (or in some cases characters in culture) who lead great lives that inspired others and the world to progress. Audrey Hepburn is obviously one of these heroes—and she was originally from Belgium, fitting for the show. My Fair Lady, although outdated in much of its politics, still is a grand musical, and Audrey Hepburn is a strong female protagonist, who transcends the Pygmalion myth at its core (I was also a big George Bernard Shaw fan in high school). The art director for the film was in part Cecil Beaton, who also designed the dress (and background) of this portrait—and was famously queer/bisexual and helped to shape the look and identity of the Bright Young Things and all the great society of London and America, kings and queens, operas, that helped shape the look of chic in the early part of the twentieth century.

Audrey Hepburn was a great actress, but also an incredible humanitarian. In her roles, in my mind, she always encapsulated feminine power—she couldn’t have been more charming and beautiful, but driving her characters was grit and determination—they usually led the dance of any plot, and her amazing intelligence and whimsy was delicately balanced by her drive and engineering of the worlds in which her characters made. She was in comedies, but also dramas and thrillers and was equally wonderful at everything. Growing up, I idealized her in films, perhaps there is a connection with the feminine powerful and gay men, as much as other types who are models for us.

As a young adult, in contemporary media, I knew her to be an outspoken advocate for UNICEF, working with poor communities with empathy and compassion in Asia, Africa, and South America, and was a statesman for humanity and culture, who I revered.

I also revere my mom—and I grew up with a lovely portrait of her growing up, painted by a famous local New Orleans artist wonderfully, and it was the artwork I believe I looked at and meditated to (with warmth, feeling, and pride) more than any other artwork in our home, as it was installed always across our dining room, for any fancy meal, Christmas, etc., the portrait would keep us fantastic company. This painting of Audrey Hepburn reminds me of that portrait—my own mother is equally as beautiful in every way. This painting has hung across this portrait of my mom, above the fireplace in my parents’ home for years, I’m proud that it’s there, but it doesn’t hold a candle to the painting of my mom!

I’m a huge Fassbinder fan, and at the end of one of his stories, everybody always dies or comes to a horrible end. But then hopefully from the ruin of that, you can learn about, just like any ruin, the culture in which that ruin began and try not to do the same thing. I’m consciously thinking about Warhol and feel like Warhol really loved the figures that he was painting. I think Warhol’s story was that he was this poor pockmarked kid from Pittsburgh who loved Marilyn Monroe and wanted to be like Marilyn Monroe… and by the painting of her, maybe he became like that.

When he did Jackie, he would repeat them endlessly, and I felt like he participated in not what he was critiquing, but maybe embellishing…

Walter Benjamin, in Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction mentions when actors are constantly under the camera’s gaze they lose something of their agency as they’re put into these films… It becomes more about the director than they as people. And by constantly replicating Jackie, Warhol, over and over again, he is sort of doing what capital did to these people already. If Warhol is taking Jackie out of her context of her real funeral, and just making it a chic image—you know, of course I love him and I think he’s great—but I think at the same time its not about who Jackie was as a person…

What happens is the risk of that redundancy that we lose who they are as people or we forget their history. What I think for me is important, is to bring back who they were as people, and like any portraitist, try to essentialize what it was about them that made them so great. When I made this image, I was trying to get back to the real feelings that the Kennedy’s had for this real event that changed history and the real funeral where they, the nation, and the world was mourning the loss of this great leader who meant so much for the world, and his wife who carried the strength and resolve and positive ideology that she continued to bring to the all the important, great work she did in her life.
(excerpted from an interview with Ross Bleckner in 2006 for show catalog)

This is an image appropriated from a cover of an old boxed set of JFK speeches on vinyl that I found somewhere. I love the heroic trope of the image that somehow supercedes being clichéd or banal by the power of the image, of John F. Kennedy and the Stars and Stripes of Old Glory. I was born just post JFK, in 1966, and so was always naively nostalgic about him and his era, but somehow felt that truly the nation had been "better" or that, growing up as a young child in the sixties and seventies, on the tail end of the Boomers, that the hippies—my babysitters, teachers, and cultural influencers were right about the country going wrong after his assignation. Certainly my parents are also liberal, although a little too old to have been hippies, they were part of a smart cocktail generation that had beatniks, jazz, and poetry on the sidelines with their own wave of being anti-authoritarian and suspect of egregious uses of power. While painting this work, I listened to many audiobooks of John F. Kennedy, and of course had learned and thought about him before in my mature life, and knew and know he was a flawed figure, however I’m still bowled over by his handsome regard for integrity, his spirit and intelligence, and before Obama—and my knowing of Obama—a great president who mostly told the truth and tried his best to steer the country in great directions (despite also nearly bringing us to the brink of catastrophe, he also pulled us out of it).

The great thing about pictorial icons is that they are truly pictures that say a thousand words, but instead of merely wanting to embrace the iconographic flag in the Duchamp-like maneuver of Jasper Johns, who appropriated the pre-existing design of the flag, and painstakingly recreated it in the slow process of encaustic in different ways (which of course has its own political relevance), I think, post-Johns, it’s my job to penetrate the picture plane and while acknowledging that the painting itself is an object, do something at the same time "old school" with the power of oil paint to create plastic space, and paint through the image. I love Warhol, but in his "flattening" of the iconic figures, made them into the symbols that the culture, at the speeded up time of Corporate Commodity Culture getting its footing, made them into merely iconic symbols, without individual agency, in the same manner the culture and media was doing to the same people he was transmuting into flat, repeated images. I wanted, even with this ghost-like visage, to get to the real JFK, a Hamlet’s Ghost, coming back from the dead to deliver his message of his history.

“My taste includes both snails and oysters”—Laurence Olivier (Marcus Licinius Crassus to his slave Antoninus (Tony Curtis) in Spartacus from the 1967 rerelease.

Olivier was gay, or at least Hollywood Bisexual, having a real love affair with Vivien Leigh and other women, but also married a beard lesbian actress in his first marriage, and went out on the DL with many actors while also married to women, most famously with Danny Kaye, but also reported, by David Niven, to make out even with Marlon Brando in a pool, when Vivien’s back was turned. He was also one of the greatest actors in the twentieth century, a true genius who also directed, produced, was in the theater as much as he was filmed, and had a lifelong abundant career as a Sir Olivier, a gentleman actor who changed cultural history. He always appealed to me, watching old reruns of films and TV shows as a kid growing up, I looked to him as model of being a gentleman.

He was smart and gentle, but also grave and powerful, he let his feelings show but he also could be intensely private and cool. His genius was pervasive, I don’t think I can remember seeing him in a role playing someone naive or stupid, and he had a feline manner that could also rule. Hamlet is one of my favorite films, of him and of Shakespeare, and this image, from the also Olivier-directed Henry V, is from that sublime movie in which I’ve made many images. Here he plays a great king, who rules with authority but also sincerity and conviction. I like how in this image he looks like he came from a Holbein, in fact, it seems like his dress, or at least his fabulous necklace, was inspired by the portrait by Hans Holbein of Sir Thomas More at the Frick—with the same dollar-sign insignias. It’s how it’s not like the photo is what is me about it—I made this image from a black-and-white still, and brought I hope regal queer life to the painting.

That a gay man could also be so successful, with his winning ways and incredible career, truly one of the best actors of his or anyone’s generation and serve as a model of what to be a man—in a queer—or at least, not presenting in an American patriarchal phallocentric way, is outstanding to me. He has always been one of my influences, and a great hero.

Jimi Hendrix is a god-like icon of music—someone who was able to reach infinity with his song writing and playing. A band like Led Zeppelin is fantastic, but there is a ceiling to the metaphors and even Jimmy Page’s incredible guitar work. Hendrix is transcendence—the poetry of his lyricism, his sci-fi mystical vision, and his uncanny, ineffable music takes rock and roll, jazz, and rhythmic stylings into another dimension. He also is exemplary of the "American Dream," working his way up the ladder (as an ex army man!) through the Chitlin’ Circuit, working with greats like Little Richard, but never being satisfied, and not allowing others to put him in a box or subjugate his vision. When he fully emerged in England, he blew everyone away with his incredible playing and songwriting—all the white Brits that were emulating and appropriating American Blues and Rock n’ Roll couldn’t believe the genius they saw before them, in a short time, Hendrix took over the world. I love that he comes out of love—that he really wanted to create a church with his music—to have people FEEL what it is that he was playing and singing about, in a deep way that they would be forever moved—and they were. Like any great music, I can listen to Hendrix again and again, and get something new out of it—and I he really crosses and exceeds genres—typically he is known for Rock n’ Roll and the Sixties, but I think he is much more than that—his genius knows no bounds. I hope that my work and painting in particular can emulate what he is striving for—and in particular, how his music and lyrics fuse together in form and content to become something that is transcendent beyond language. Painting this I listened exclusively to his entire oeuvre, read about him, and really tried to get within the music and its message. I’m hoping that, like in his music, my work is able to break into abstraction, and hope that in his vest and his body it not only synaesthetically captures the mood and feeling of the music, but also slips into unconscious other worlds. The image is from an old Rock n’ Roll book that our friend Alicia gave us specifically so I could paint this image before she shockingly died from complications due to AIDS (none of us, including her, knew she had it!), so this painting was also an homage to a dear friend—my husband Andrew’s best friend, and like at the end of a New Orleans jazz funeral, I hope this painting brought a jubilant epiphany and coda, looking towards a spiritual future, after the end of her amazing life.

Hergé, the creator of Tintin, is one of the great masters of cartooning in any era, his work is truly sublime and transcendent. He can make stories and the semiotics of word/image combination symbiotic like Swiss clockwork (although he is Belgian!). He changed the art of comics in Europe (and perhaps the world) and what Osamu Tezuka is to Japan, or Charles Schulz (maybe Walt Disney) is to America, Hergé is to Europe.  Tintin began though as a frankly racist cartoon, with the notorious boy reporter working in Congo, with stereotyped images and caricatures made by a man who had never traveled there but benefited from the income generated there by Belgian people’s colonialist exploitation of the Congo for rubber and other goods. It took a close friend, a Chinese foreign exchange student, to influence him—if his boy reporter (or explorer, in the Nazi era to avoid the politics) was to explore the world, instead of colonizing it, he should really respect the countries and worlds he visited, learn from them and grow. This began, with the album The Blue Lotus to herald in the mature era of Tintin, with deeply moving (and symbolic allegorical) stories, made with precision and absolute exquisite expertise, stories that investigated and explored other worlds, for his many readers to suture into the avatar of Tintin and explore along with him, for the better understanding of all people and respect of different cultures and attitudes.

This was for a show I did in Brussels on my fortieth birthday called Heroes and wanted to put this into the window to appeal to Belgians, but also to espouse my love for them and their culture, especially Tintin. Tintin is kind of gay, his best friend and companion is the bear Captain Haddock, the whole cosmology is all men, except for Bianca Castafiore, the opera diva, who is like a drag queen. I think Hergé lived through a lot of his characters and enjoyed the homosocial adventures in the privacy of his own studio composing the works. When the Nazis invaded and took over Belgium, Hergé continued doing his strip. He was accused of being a sympathizer, but he would retort, “The bakers still made bread, I made my comic.” The strip became more fantastical, to avoid the censure of the Nazis, as then the character and his world spoke largely through metaphor and melodrama—allegorically about humanity as the Nazis murder and oppression wore on. These stories are full of heart and purpose, he clearly was committed to humanitarian concerns throughout his stories, which are also full of wonder and quixotic feeling and ideas.

I have taught comics, as the lead comics instructor for over twenty-five years, and now at USC, where I began a Visual Narrative Art program. Although I’m not a cartoonist, my installations have paintings that speak to one another in nonlinear visually poetic ways—the engine of my installs and painting is about comics. Suturing into the character I’m painting, I feel while I don’t become them, I communicate and channel the icons that I paint, to bring out—like a method actor—the feelings and painterly emotions of the characters I portray. I love Tintin, he was a guide through my life (along with my own dog versions of his), and it was wonderful to make this picture as I was journeying forth into my middle age.

Captain Marvel, otherwise known as Shazam, is a superhero originally created in 1939 by the artist C.C. Beck and the writer Bill Parker, and this image was from his first appearance in Whiz Comics #2, published by Fawcett Comics in 1940. I first knew Shazam from the live action Saturday Morning serial from my ’70’s youth, and really enjoyed watching Billy Batson say the magic word "Shazam" that made him grow into a full blown immortal superhero man Captain Marvel—"in a never ending mission to right wrongs, to develop understanding, and to seek justice for all!" Part of the power of comics is the ability for a reader to identify and relate, to "suture into" the characters they are reading, just like alter egos in comics who put on a mask and become their better selves, or in Billy’s case, say a powerful word and become a man of power. Art is language, and language is power, and while painting, not that I believe in wish fulfillment completely, I like to sometimes create optimistic images to meditate upon so perhaps, as I’m solving the abstract puzzle pieces of form, light, color, and so on, perhaps simultaneously, if I’m thinking about my thoughts, I can also solve the problems of my day. For a cartoonist, or any artist, when you are drawing well, sometimes your "right brain turns on" and you lose a sense of your critical consciousness, your "left brain" and it is like a dream-like state where your unconscious can be given full reign. If dreams are in part about your mind solving problems of your day so you wake up with epiphanies, perhaps making art in this manner can do the same thing. Also, when you are drawing well, and your character is smiling, you might find you are smiling too, "masking" into the character as you draw, and alchemizing them, making them "come alive" as they are your two-dimensional puppet that you are animating by suturing in.

I love Roy Lichtenstein and Warhol, and other masters of Pop Art that made Duchampian maneuvers with their appropriations, especially when they appropriated comics and brought them into the realm of fine art. But with these masters, it was more about a critical, very conscious take on the forms they were looking at, and in some cases, aesthetically "improving"—when you see panels by the original comic artist that Lichtenstein was appropriating, you can see that its not a strict translation—he would change contour lines, Ben-day dots, sometimes the colors and backgrounds. But these geniuses weren’t "suturing in"—it wasn’t about for them "becoming the characters" as much as it was about using these images as tropes to critically talk about "high" vs. "low" culture, for the symbolism and metaphors—and yes, the narrative syntax that could still have metaphoric and allegorical reliability to fine art viewers. And in Warhol’s case, perhaps he really did want to become a Superman, an Elvis, a Jackie—but it wasn’t about him "masking into" the character with warmth and emotion, living through their avatar to make them come alive.

I’m friends, I’m proud to say, and have shown with the contemporary master Peter Saul, and love of course Philip Guston, who both (Peter I believe emerged slightly before Guston!), along with the Hairy Who and more used cartoon iconography in a more traditional manner—speaking through the iconic avatar and narrative scene they are rendering with not just allegorical intent, but actually "warming" the characters by perhaps "becoming them" for the moments they are painting and drawing, in a similar way as traditional cartoonists, but using their intelligence and great abilities to paint to create transcendent, moving images that are relatable via their aesthetic, resonate as to their allegorical outcome, and feel "alive" due to their great ability to manipulate paint and their meditations while painting.

With my "cartoon paintings" I’m striving to do both a "Modernist" and "Post Modernist" strategy—to make culturally relatable imagery self consciously, but also to be able to have a transformative experience in the act of painting while also working unselfconsciously—being in the "moment," being mindful, and allowing my instincts to riff upon the subject matter and what it conjures within me to make work that hopefully has a life of its own.

With C.C. Beck, he had a beautiful, deceptively simple manner of drawing that I find gorgeous, but also terrific in its ability to allow one to "suture in" as it is incredibly iconic. This, married to how it was printed on this original newsprint sheet (I found a page of this in the Picture Collection at the New York Public Library) that had become patinaed in time, and the colors were already slightly off-register. It’s intriguing to me to totally observe the paper and the printing when I’m painting, as it can be a key to making the work ultimately more optical and three dimensional, in a manner the traditional Pop artists might not—they were concerned about surface, and sometimes, sure, had texture and abstraction incorporated into a "push pull" image, but it wasn’t about optically puncturing into the picture plane. With my comic works, I want the letters to appear three dimensional, in a manner of the old 70’s animated logos of shows such as Shazam, but also use the off-register colors as key elements to make even the contour lines three dimensional, cutting through space. Picasso loved cartoons, and of course, much of his work took the same cartoon tactics as he lived through his avatars while painting. If I could take the same strategy when I’m working with appropriated imagery, bending it optically through the plastic vehicle of oil paint, perhaps my subconscious can emerge within the frame of the design of the original image. Like Picasso, who has silhouette of himself consciously and unconsciously appearing in imagery, I think the Billy’s hair here seems to form a slight silhouetted profile, of perhaps C.C. Beck but also maybe myself. The locks of hair appear almost like fingers, and as I was painting the optical black by many times over going into it with purple, red, and blue tones, I start to see dream like imagery in the optical space of that world, and the liminal like space of the cloud like form of his word balloon in whites and purples above. Hopefully the image itself could act as a talisman to project thoughts onto, breaking form into abstraction. While young Billy here might not be a Mount St. Victoire, he acts similarly as a character that I can relate to, become, remind me of my own youth and aspirations as my unconscious mind melds with my conscious mind in my own transformative act yearning for transcendence.

Arthur Rimbaud was a visionary and a genius, someone who changed literature by the time they were eighteen years old, and “retired” by age twenty-one. Infamously, Rimbaud was a wonderer, a poet, totally queer, who came upon the great poet Paul Verlaine and came onto him, seeking his mentorship and wanting his sex. This is from one of the amazing photos of him, by Etienne Carjat, a cohort from Vilains Bonshommes, the group of bohemians that Verlaine and he hung out with, taken in 1870 when he was about nineteen years old. This is one of the few images of him, one that always in my mind seems alive, like a Harry Potter painting, with his eyes perpetually looking through the lens of time right at you. In his works, which have moved me since I took a visionary fiction class at Brown, and still move me today in wonderous ways that still make me see new things in my mind’s eye. He is one of those cultural heroes that you can fall in love within high school, that never lose their steam (or their respectability) all through your life. His prose is ingenious, science fiction, fantasy, dark occult, religious, alive. His desire permeates his language—he is a horny lad—but also hungry for adventure. “One must be absolutely modern,” he wrote, which Lee Krasner scrawled on her wall for inspiration.

He was into synesthetics: “I invented colors for the vowels! A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green. I made rules for the form and movement of every consonant, and I boasted of inventing, with rhythms from within me, a kind of poetry that all the senses, sooner or later, would recognize. And I alone would be its translator.” This for me is what in essence I try to do in my painting from ideas, allegories, and language.

From one of his infamous “seer” letters he wrote to his teacher:

“Now, I am degrading myself as much as possible. Why? I want to be a poet, and I am working to make myself a seer: you will not understand this, and I don’t know how to explain it to you. It is a questioning of reaching the unknown by the derangement of all the senses. The sufferings are enormous, but one must be strong, one must be born a poet, and I know I am a poet. This is not at all my fault. It is wrong to say: I think. One ought to say: people think me. Pardon the pun [penser, “to think”; panser “to groom”].”

And:

“I is another. If the brass wakes the trumpet, it’s not its fault. That’s obvious to me: I witness the unfolding of my own thought: I watch it, I hear it: I make a stroke with the bow: the symphony begins in the depths, or springs with a bound onto the stage.”

“The first study for the man who wants to be a poet is knowledge of himself, complete: he searches for his soul, he inspects it, he puts it to the test, he learns it. As soon as he has learned it, he must cultivate it! I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet becomes a seer through a long, immense, and reasoned derangement of all the senses. All shapes of love, suffering, madness. He searches himself, he exhausts all poisons in himself, to keep only the quintessence’s. Ineffable torture where he needs all his faith, all his superhuman strength, where he becomes among all men the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed one—and the supreme Scholar! For he reaches the unknown! …. So the poet is actually a thief of Fire!”

I can’t write better than Rimbaud, but like the modernists were inspired by him, so too am I. When painting, a third hand starts to paint the picture for you. After way more than 10,000 hours of painting, I’ve found that I’ve learned my tool set well, and that I can provoke my unconscious to take over at some points in both the initial strokes and the end of micromanaging. Actors love to “fly” after rehearsing their lines and roles when they are finally onstage, sutured into the character. For comics, the best cartoonists can suture into the mask of the form that they are creating—and become the avatar. When I paint, I channel, channel my unconscious, my subconscious, the spirits in the air that are part of the ether of what I paint. Painting is close to puppetry, hence my love for painting puppets and cartoons—it is the painter’s job to become the puppeteer, to be able to perform the character and make them come alive. With real-life personas, especially those who have passed, not that I’m a medium, but as I engross myself in the painterly reverie of making my work, I do feel as if I’m talking to them, with them, like I’m the photographer trying to set up the shot, and in the old age of the daguerreotype, perhaps this takes a long time, and as I paint, I channel the entity into my brush and onto the canvas and it speaks to me, with me, getting their hair cut in a barber shop, they speak to me and the painting becomes alive.

Montgomery Clift was one of the greatest actors of all time, changed culture by beginning the sensitive portrayal of men from a deep emotional center—that was the birth in many ways, or greatest influence on icons such as Marlon Brando and James Dean, and the rebel beatnik- then hippie-then sensitive men—of generations to come. In all his roles he’s great, and he also is a great tragic hero, but in the beginning, he was just magnificent. This is a head shot from Red River, the amazing western starring John Wayne and directed by the canonical John Ford. Patriarch Wayne heads out to Texas to conquer some land and cattle, he picks up a lone kid whose folks got murdered by Indigenous people, and both the kid’s calf and the character that grows into Monty Clift join Wayne’s homosocial cowboy family.

But scion is much different than big dad, and his sensitive portrayal of the college- educated cowboy that comes back to help his father with the last big cattle migration to save the farm is an affable and smart guy, who enjoys comparing pistols with other cowboys, and chooses words over bullets, love over fighting. Like other queer actors I’ve painted, Clift was a hero to me as a young man, as he was gentlemanly and intelligent, a “good guy” who always tried his best as an actor and a person—but also in his roles was usually othered—sometimes as contemptuous villains hiding behind handsome masks, but most often as misunderstood good guys. I first knew his name from the Clash song “The Right Profile” and got to be friendly with his biographer Patricia Bosworth before she died.

Although his life was a tragedy, it wasn’t as bad it has been characterized, as the documentary made by his nephew testifies. He was largely misunderstood, and after his infamous car crash, he had to perform through a broken face (maybe intuited here), it was all in the eyes and the eyebrows, and the vocal inflections. Despite his excesses, Monty also lived a very un-secret gay life, and never seemed ashamed for who he was. He remained a great actor all his life, one of his last scenes as an actor in Judgment at Nuremberg sequence, although twelve minutes long, is devastating. In his role in Red River, he makes up with his surrogate father in the end, instead of fighting, they roll around together, laughing. It’s in this spirit, that of the elegant, proud, and peaceful queer that I wanted to capture him. I’m from Colorado, and far from being a cowboy, can two-step to the awesome jingle brought on by the spurs of his gay cowboy vibe.

Bugs Bunny is an everlasting character who goes way beyond his creator, or his best animators (Chuck Jones and more), and still is a persona who lives among us in our world and time. I’m fascinated by characters like him, whether they first appeared in opera (like Tristan and Isolde), or the puppet stage (Punch and Judy, Kermit the Frog), or in comics (Snoopy, Superman, Batman, and so many more), it’s amazing to me when a creator makes a character, like Pygmalion, come to life and then that Frankenstein’s monster has a life of his own.

The Warner Bros. cartoons are of course amazing, and despite their violence, the “wackiness” of the stories are always so winning and wonderful. Bugs Bunny is a true hero (and this painting was created for a show called Heroes, one of the first “chapters” of My American Dream). The essential thing about Bugs is that he only retaliates after he is first trod upon, he fights back whomever might be trying to repress or subjugate him most—that is why he is a hero. He is super smart, but also super queer—the consummate outsider, loner, and rebel. He lives by himself in his posh pad underground, doing his own thing at the risk and subversion of the Symbolic Patriarchal Order. He pantomimes them—Elmer Fudd is the ultimate white trash, the repressive state apparatus and Joe Six Pack rolled into one. Bugs will kiss him on his nose, do dances literally around him, point Elmer’s shotgun back in face and have it blow him. Bugs dresses in drag, puts on lipstick and wigs, fully embraces his own feminine mystique and coos and blows kisses too at the audience, Daffy Duck, anyone who will listen. He is proud of his queerness, lives in holes, and stands erect when capitulated into love, his heart beating outside of his body, his eyes becoming heart-shaped valentines that go “va-voom” when aroused.

Here, Bugs puts his hand into his makeshift, cartoony, and constantly morphing body, creating a new hole where there wasn’t any, exploring that side of himself in an onanistic act of self-pleasure, his other thumb and forefingers also become erect at half-mast, following the course of his bunny ears that are at full mast. He is in love with himself, not in a bad way but proud, knowing his own power and how to shift the tide of mankind who tries to hunt him down. He is a force of nature, here on one of the amazing California landscape paintings that were probably created by someone whose day job was creating art for the studio, when they really wanted to be at their easel in Laguna Beach. It’s a bucolic day as Bugs strides, his arms akimbo, the negative space between his arms and legs also forming holes, vaginal and anal-like spaces he also occupies in his gender queer, masculine/feminine self-contained sexuality and demeanor, like an ever-blossoming flower that packs a punch with his thorns, Bugs is a queer hero.

In Brussels, when I painted this around the time of my fortieth birthday, the famous Duccio painting of Madonna and Child had recently been acquired by the Met. This is a magic painting that I did an appropriation of, which is totally alive as a work with many hidden secrets. The family that sold the painting acquired Bugs—I like to think with the same funds they received from the Met! It’s a bit farfetched I know, but I like to think that my work is somehow an extension of the art of Duccio, or perhaps Bugs Bunny—like he lives on, the characters in this great giant (but tiny!) work also live, and as I try to honor these masters, try to catch onto their coattails and make works that alchemize with life hereafter.

Painted originally for the Heroes series, the beginning of the My American Dream meta-narrative, this painting represents Errol Flynn, who was a great actor who happened to be bisexual but powerful and one of the greats who started United Artists, as the character Robin Hood, one of the best characters in adventure story fiction. I realized at this point in my career that although I had been painting people in a sort of "star system" where I would "employ" them to act out in characters in stories of my own device, that while painting important people in history, there was enough story in them, and historical resonance to give them symbolic weight and allegorical power, and that they also had enough visual verve to send me into great meditations while painting. This image had both the real-life hero that was Flynn, and the cultural hero of Robin Hood, so it was really "one stop shopping" while painting—I could think of this man who changed Hollywood with his winning charisma, one that was partially derived from his "queerdom," and also the "queer" notions of how Robin Hood was able to stand strong outside the capitalist, phallocentric order—how as a rebel and a rogue he was able to contradict a poisoned authority and bring justice to all the people in his land with style and panache. I love Cézanne rocks and foliage, that for me spill into unconscious worlds that were projected by his subconscious onto the map of what his conscious mind was painting, and hope that here the wild other worlds of Nature also steep into an unconscious, optimistic dream world of all this painting can stand for—not just for children in the UK, but generations of Americans and all parts of the world this great character—and actor who defined Robin Hood and is still the definitive performance.

As a son of a psychoanalyst, I do believe we have turn over the rocks and see all the writhing worms in order to get over them—hence my love for Fassbinder. I think of "Post post-modern" as just a time differentiation, as it’s 2015, long after whenever "post-modernism" was an "ism." But personally I also think it can be the "have your cake and eat it too, plan" where you can make work that is "smart," self-knowing, in how it can be contextualized and relevant in a larger cultural and historical atmosphere (if this was what Post Modernism was about) but also have room for the ineffable, beauty, emotions, feelings, etc., and formally complex within the hegemony of the picture plane, or mise-en-scene in cinematic terms. Fassbinder and Pasolini really inspired me in college for doing all these things (although maybe they were working in Post Modern times, technically? Ugh, what does it matter…).

I was drawing, as they say, since I could hold a pencil, and I was always the "cartoon guy" on campus, since grade school the primary person creating illustrations and comics for school publications through Brown University, where I went as an undergrad, and did the daily comic strip. I was a Studio Art and also Semiotics major at Brown, where I first began to paint and also involve myself in theater, performing in plays and writing and directing them, all the while studying the ideas and language philosophy surrounding French theory and semiotics. I also love visionary fiction, poetry, and film (at the time classes on Fassbinder and Pasolini were incredibly impactful, as they addressed theory/philosophy, psychoanalysis, Marx/Freud, in emotional narrative context), which I put into my work as an artist, playwright, and cartoonist. When I got out of Brown, I came to NYC to be a "New Yorker Cartoonist," thinking that would pay my way to write and to paint, not knowing at the time that it took years, just like as a fine artist, to break into the magazine. While I was dropping off ten cartoons a week, I had jobs at an art magazine as an editorial assistant, and later, at a major blue chip gallery uptown. Before, having grown up in Colorado and not having access to great fine art galleries or museums, I didn’t realize you can "do this" as a career (I still think an "art career" is oxymoronic—that being in artists is about thinking like one and hopefully creating things, and if you can exhibit or sell work this is just icing on the cake), but that art, like a cartoon, was about bringing up ideas aesthetically. I realized that creating fine art wasn’t just about making people laugh, but deeper thoughts perhaps, and while I knew I didn’t have it in me to be a theoretician, and having created images longer than writing plays, I thought I would go to grad school to pursue the high goal of becoming whatever it might be to be a "fine artist."

Saving my pennies from my earnings in New York, I went to live with my best friend and his girlfriend in Colorado, where he was living at his mother’s home (who at the time was divorced and not living there). Serendipitously for the Biennial, his girlfriend was Lisa Anne Auerbach, my Biennial roommate! We all were making work to apply for grad school in Southern California, where the best schools were, and where Mike Kelley and friends were shaking things up in the early 90’s. Having seen his work of the stuffed animals on the blankets at Metro Pictures had a huge effect on me—I realized that what he was doing was different than many of the post-Duchamp practices at the time. He was finding the ready-mades of the plushies and the blankets, like Duchamp, and putting them in a gallery and calling it "art," but more than this, like Fassbinder in some ways, there were narratives with the "characters" and how they were placed in their arrangements, and there was also emotion in the patina frays of the animals, and a certain empathic nostalgia generated by relating to these iconic forms. I thought it was a breakthrough, or at least for me, I had an epiphany of a Post Post Modernism, where you could "have your cake and eat it too" and make work, like Duchamp, that related to the world outside the art object, that was "about something" that could be political and/or about the viewer "waking up" to their perceptions of things, ideologies, and different perspectives. But, like Modernism, you could also simultaneously make work that was about the ineffable, about feeling and emotion, the hegemony of the formal aspects of a piece, that could be a meditation that transcended language, perhaps even evoking the Kantian sublime.

After painting though works involving people like Keanu Reeves "portraying Hamlet" I realized more and more that it was significant that I was doing these portraits, which ultimately were about bringing about the inner personality of the person I was portraying as much as what they stood for. Maybe Keanu Reeves was a bad actor! And wouldn’t it be more significant to paint someone who really had an effect on culture, someone like James Dean, who was one of the first people to give a voice to a youth generation, inspiring Elvis to be Elvis, and John Lennon to be John Lennon, giving birth to Rock and Roll? I love Warhol, but think he might have had Aspergers, as although he was obviously a genius, like people who have ASD, wasn’t emotional, and would "flatten out" his icons in silkscreens, building on Duchamp in paintings that eschewed the painterly notions of mood, texture, and expression. Could you bring emotions and a painterly touch like Rembrandt to a culturally relevant icon like Dean? Would this be something "new"?

In this work, I wanted to marry these two (or three, if you count the actor Brad Davis, one of the first Hollywood actors to die of AIDS related causes) great artists, who were meeting on the set of a film that had a huge impact on my life Querelle, based on the incredible writer Jean Genet’s seminal book. I remember first seeing the coming attraction of Querelle at the Denver downtown art movie house The Ogden, and it excitedly me greatly—it was obviously "gay" but in a masculine, aesthetically super charged and intensely sexual way. I never had the guts to see it in person in this closeted time in my repressed Colorado suburban environment, but like punk rock, it gave me a clue to a broader world that existed in culture and art beyond my own gated community. When I finally saw it in the Kaja Silverman-taught class at Brown, it sent me to the moon, and I watched it repeatedly after this, significantly when I was playing a hustler in a school play, and was trying to "get into the character" inspired by the film and Brad Davis’ performance. Even for Fassbinder officianos it’s the Fassbinder film that uncool to like, and I could never quite understand why. Like David Lynch’s Dune (another cult classic!) it is its own complete atmospheric world, like a Gene Kelley musical, hermetic onto itself, with dance-like moves all sexually choreographed and staged, and a strange rhythm in its voice and pacing. I love suturing into its world, and more that Tom of Finland and the like, taught me, inspired by Genet, that you can be "masculine" and gay, unlike most of the feminitized flamboyance of gays depicted in popular culture until this time. And of course, Fassbinder and Warhol are "old queens" but powerful artists with integrity in their own right. If you could marry the cultural relativity of Warhol, with the intellect and psychological and political ideology and use of melodrama and narrative (and avant garde sensibilities of both) you could really have something—influenced by these two giants, I try.