I was born in 1966, so was still an impressionable kid growing up when Billie Jean King was making her legend in tennis, and for feminist rights. She had a great impact on me and my family (who also played tennis!). As liberals in 1970’s Denver Colorado, our family loved watching Billie Jean King not just play tennis, but also perform as a cultural hero for women’s rights, and later, as an out lesbian, for LGBTQ+ rights. She still is a dynamic living cultural icon who serves to remind and inspire people around to world for all she stands for. This image is of Billie Jean King holding the Wimbledon trophy after winning the Women’s Singles event in 1975, but I hope also acts as a triumphant image for all civil rights.
While painting, I listened—TWICE–to all 16 hours of her self-narrated biography, ALL IN, in addition to watching documentaries about her and her life, which was so moving. I also listened to Elton John music, one of her best friends–whose “Philadelphia Freedom” was written for her and her team the Philadelphia Freedoms and mixed-gender professional doubles tennis league (along with 70’s feminist singer/songwriter classics like Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez and more!). BJK was such a pioneer for the women’s rights movement from the 60’s forward, and the feminist revolution that she is still a revered icon that helped to shape the world not just of tennis, but for women and the LGBTQ+ movement currently. Outed by her former girlfriend unwittingly in what became a lawsuit in the public eye, Billie Jean was forced to confront her public with her orientation, that eventually became the out and proud spokesperson for queer rights everywhere today.
I remember my folks, who loved to play and watch tennis, calling us to the television set to watch Billie Jean King in her matches. At the time, she was inspiring not just as a powerful female player, but that she also wore glasses and had short hair—both my sister and I had to wear glasses at an early age and faced the “four eyes” beratement at school, and just in that she gave us empowerment. But in her aggressive, intense, and emboldened play and sensibility, Billie Jean King also showed us what it was to be, at that moment in the early 70’s, a gender bending, non-conforming idea of what it was to be a woman. Our family embraced the cultural likes of Helen Reddy and her “I Am a Woman” song, MS. Magazine and Gloria Steinem, and the ERA movement– and even the Virginia Slims “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby” slogan (that emblazoned the Virginia Slims Circuit of women trailblazers that King helped to begat) were a huge influence for my family and generation.
Confronting the misogyny of tennis in her time, creating her own circuit (and later, the as mentioned, the World Team Tennis organization of mixed gender professional tennis league!), King was a public spokesman for Feminist movement, the ERA, and was a hero in my youth, who actively, in both her sport and her actions, showed the world what it was to be a powerful woman standing up for woman’s rights. When in the early 80’s she was forced out of the closet, she (after a time where she was admittedly embattled not to fully embrace her identity given the oppressive nature of the times) became an icon as a powerful lesbian leader, and an LGBTQ+ leader whose powerful cultural influence still pervades. She is both a legendary tennis athlete and historic legend for equal rights of all kinds. For over twenty years she dominated tennis, winning 39 Grand Slam singles, doubles, and mixed doubles tennis titles and 20 titles at Wimbledon. I still remember the 1973 famous “Battle of the Sexes” against Bobby Riggs, where she defeated the “misogynist pig” Riggs portrayed, becoming a symbol for women’s rights in my youth. As a cultural leader, she has been given many awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barak Obama in 2009 for championing the rights of women and the LGBTQ community, and has even has a library named in her honor in Long Beach CA, her childhood home.
My sister is wonderfully an out lesbian who also is cultural engaged in her politics and her work, being a therapist for LGBTQ+ youth, and I hope I keep the flame alive both in my artwork and my teaching as a tenured Professor of Art at the University of Southern California in addition to my activism. Billie Jean King has been an icon and a model for us personally as a successful, happy queer person (who also has been married with her decades long partner in life and tennis Ilana Kloss) who is also strong, super successful, ambitious, and proud, fighting the good fight both in tennis and her life, not just for herself, but the rights of agency women and the LGBTQ+ communities. It was my honor to create this image, which hopefully is allegorical for all her triumph amidst challenges and controversy.
I’m proud that an ink and watercolor version of this image is in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum, as part of a 4 drawing series “Rising Up!”, along with queer icons Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, David Wojnarowicz /Act UP, and Harvey Milk.
The World of Jim Henson and the Muppets NOTES by the artist
This is from a publicity image of Jim Henson and the Muppets, from what is most likely 1975, around the time of the first Muppets special that inspired the official Muppet Show, “Sex and Violence” a pilot episode of sorts, that had the character on the bottom left hand corner, Nigel, as host (later relegated to a minor role of leader of the orchestra), and a very early incarnation of Miss Piggy, who appear on the top right of the image.
I love Jim Henson and everything he stands for, and have painted now many Muppet paintings, most “starring” Kermit the Frog, Henson’s avatar, whom I also personally identify with. Growing up in the suburbs of Denver, Sesame Street was my access to the Civil Rights Movement, which was the foundation for the show, very consciously, with those leaders helping to establish the “neighborhood” where people of different color and class could all cohabit with cooperation and peace and understanding. The Muppets, who are all colors of the rainbow, made out of felt without any genitalia, are truly queer subjects, despite any desires or orientation they might perform, and not only were civil rights propagated in the show but also queerness—the very essence of “It’s Not Easy Being Green”, Kermit’s signature song, was edifying for a still undeclared queer kid growing up uncoordinated with glasses in the 70’s. I was the perfect age for the Muppets, born in 1966 (Sesame Street began in 1969, the Muppet Show in 1974) and literally grew up with them, and the genius that is Jim Henson, who was a total inspiration to me as an artist as he was to the world.
I was the campus cartoonist growing up, from kindergarten illustrating the cafeteria menu pages in the elementary school paper to creating the daily comic strip at Brown University for the Brown Daily Herald. Although I didn’t become a professional cartoonist, I became a professional exhibiting artist who has taught comics all his life in addition to fine art–and now have created a Visual Narrative Art program at the University of Southern California Roski School of Art and Design, in collaboration with the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, and the Lucas funded School of Cinematic Arts Animation and Gaming departments. I believe in power of art to transform culture—to paraphrase Joseph Campbell “an artists’ job is to tell stories for a culture to understand itself in order for the culture to progress”, and Henson has done this as I have tried to also do in my humble way.
I listened to the Henson biography by Brian Jay Jones, and watched all the Muppet Shows on my laptop in the background, played soundtracks from the Muppet albums of my youth, and watched Muppet films and the documentaries about Henson when not painting during the rendering process of this picture. One of my favorite artists is James Ensor, and I love the painting of his Self Portrait with Masks from 1899, where he is immersed amongst masked characters from his mother’s gift shop below his studio in Belgium that populated his cartoonish paintings, and here I was consciously thinking of the uncanny valley of Henson in the center of his own cosmology, bringing out with painterly form the feelings of each of his beloved characters—in this image, his own self portrait as a puppet appears with some of his cohort puppeteers, so this is a portrait of him and his own portraits of different sides of his cosmology and company, an appropriation of what must been an approved publicity shot for his world. I’ve been interested since my first oil paintings in college in rendering cartoon characters as if they are “real”, and certainly puppets inhabit our own 3-d space, but to amalgamate both human and puppet into an image is how I’m hopefully transforming the original appropriated photo—in addition to the semiotics of putting this image in context with the rest of the My American Dream oeuvre and this “chapter,” City of Angels. I love Warhol for his contextualization of popular culture and his Duchampian moves of bringing everyday readymade pop iconography into a fine art realm—but feel he must have been on the spectrum as his imagery has flattened out real people into icons—not just like religious icons, but also how, in a post-Modern view, the agency of his figures have been reified into Capital, like how Marilyn Monroe must have become lost in the machine that transformed her for popular consumption. I love the painterliness of Rembrandt, where we might not know the subject of his portraits but can synesthetically “feel” the emotions and passions of the interior soul of his subjects. If we could marry the pop relevancy of a Warhol with the empathy, compassion, warmth and painterly emotion of a Rembrandt, maybe we could have something new, something I’m trying to do with my paintings—and to have them have an allegorical resonance in the context of my framework of narrative allegory for our times.
These are all personal paintings for me, too. When I was Chair of the Roski 2D program of painting, drawing and printmaking at Roski, I had to suffer the slings and arrows of how the “the politics of academia is so severe as there is so little at stake”, but sometimes there is a lot to accomplish for the good of the school and humankind. I had to turn around the dept. from an atelier, “drawing from the model” and “still lives with eggs and candles in pristine white environments” to a more critical thinking and relevant program, in addition to creating the Visual Narrative Program, in a place where the old guard gave me such pushback—“cartoons aren’t art” and “we don’t want to be a vocational school” that it gave me Crohn’s Disease in my fight to update the program to make it relevant and to open up a channel that the students desperately wanted to make work for the world. One of the most moving videos on YouTube about Henson was his public memorial held on May 21, 1990, just five days after his death, at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in NYC, which ended with (and printed on the program), his son Brian reading from a letter written to his children to be read on the occasion of his death, ““Please watch out for each other and love and forgive everybody. It’s a good life, enjoy it”. I ended the painting listening to this and weeping, painting Henson’s face as if he was talking to me, allowing myself to let go of the anger and frustrations of my life as I was, hypothetically, “channeling his spirit”, much a like a puppeteer might when projecting into their avatar their own soul.
This is a painting from a photo right off my parent’s bedroom wall, from a trip we took to Disneyworld (standing in for Disneyland in this show) the first year it had opened, in 1971 when I was just six years old. Disney had a huge influence on me just like he had for the world, and my sister and I were over the top when my parents surprised us with a trip to one of the happiest places on earth! We had been taken to every Disney movie, new and old growing up, and The Wonderful World of Disney was on television every week, and “Uncle Walt” was like a combination of a grandfather and living God projecting his vision to my imagination. When Disneyworld was being established, it was broadcast through his program, and when my sister and I were thinking we were going home from visiting my real grandparents in the South but came out of the airplane to humid air and palm trees on posters in the gateway, my sister realized the surprise excited exclaimed “we are going to Disneyworld” a moment I shall never forget!
As I rendered this, I listened to the Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination biography by Neal Gabler for yet another time, and am just as inspired now as when I was a kid by this living embodiment (and myth creator) of the true American Dream, coming from nothing and with a vision (and also coming from cartooning, like myself) building a whole world, literally with the parks but even more so with the ideological underpinnings of all his stories helped to establish. He was a genius too for recognizing other’s genius, and with his company, was able to tell the stories he wanted to tell, and invent the tools and organizations in which to do it, seldom compromising his vision for profit or motive, but sticking to his guns to make experimental film (Fantasia, and so more), pioneer Nature Documentaries, and make cartoon creations come alive (and live people into the cartoon, i.e. Mary Poppins) where anything and everything could be the simulacra that became the reality. Jim Henson and so many other creators wish they could build the imagination empire that Disney did, and despite his many faults (anti-union, becoming conservative, pro-outing Marxist leaning Hollywood during McCarthy, supposed antisemitic leanings—unproven), the overwhelming goodness of his work, created ultimately to inspire people to be their best and make the world a better place, is overwhelming. He also pioneered animatronics, and the human-meets-animated worlds of computer driven entertainments that were visionary for today—sometimes in scary ways—and the future.
I was thinking all these thoughts while creating this work, while also teaching at the University of Southern California’s Roski School of Art and Design where I am a tenured full Professor of Art—and keeping real to my roots in comics. Before coming to USC I was teaching for over 25 years at the—historic for comics—School of Visual Arts in NYC in addition to fine art at other great institutions on the East Coast, and have created a Visual Narrative Art program at Roski, in collaboration with the forthcoming Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opening across the street, and with the Lucas funded School of Cinematic Arts near us on campus. With nine classes in place, and over 100 students, and many more to come, this is becoming an established program unlike any at another American research university. Disney of course created Cal Arts, coming from educating his animators from the early days of his studio (a USC professor was one of the early teachers there, teaching film—and humor—theory!), but since the animation program is more of a tech nuts and bolts pipeline to the studios. Our program teaches students to “think like artists” outside of the box, in comics, illustration, and other narrative art, and our teachers keep it real for their own comics and art, but all have day jobs working for the industry in animation and more…. I’m proud of pioneering this program (and had to fight all the way to do this at a place where the old guard thinks that “comics aren’t art” and not wanting to become “a vocational school”), but after teaching many thousands of students comics and illustration in my 30+ years I also have been an exhibiting artist who teaches fine art, know from my students professional success how they too can make an impact. While I’m no Disney, I’m proud of my successful exhibition career as a “fine artist”, my roots (and still making graphic novels and editing them!) and very proud of my career teaching storytelling through visual mediums—hopefully practicing what I preach making emotive and warm painterly paintings that also tell stories—and like in this show, “talk to other paintings” like panels in a comic, building if not an empire, at least a teaching one of many happy students and alumni making the world a better place in many ways beyond my own personal visions.
Los Angeles from a Plane is from my own photo, taken on a trip to Berlin several years ago when the plane was circling overhead en route to LAX to land. The view is also like what I see en route to my job teaching as a full professor of art at the University of Southern California, and from where I park on top of one of their parking lots, edifying to see in every way to remind me of the greatness-and also the mystery and intensity—of our fair city.
Before coming to LA eight years ago to teach at USC, I was with my husband in Manhattan, where I also painted many images of that Gotham cityscape—from the top of the Empire State Building, of One World Trade Center, and more (even from the rooftop of where we lived before first coming to California, on 46th Street and Fifth Ave!). This is my first painting of Los Angeles, and I was thinking of the great Wim Wenders 1987 film Wings of Desire when angels are “flying” from overhead Berlin. I wanted this image to have a similar kind of wonder, and feeling, from the POV of the sky, making Los Angeles, if not like an island like Manhattan, a sublime landscape of population and building spread out over the territory of Southern California, but with the land and the sky ultimately not overwhelmed—humankind cohabitating with Nature and the world.
While painting, I listened to the great City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, in addition to all the music from Southern California that inspired me then and now about the “California Dream”. I love Cézanne, and his paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire, and wanted (also being a son of a psychoanalyst, with a penchant for the unconscious) to have my conscious mind render what I saw in the photo, but also my unconscious to bring out the subconscious world suggested by the pixels and “noise” of the image. I took the image through the window with an iPhone, at not a super high resolution, and although I’m looking at a large 17 x 22” glossy high-res print of the original image, there is a lot of distortion in the tiny details of the image. I always like to paint the pixels as if they are “real” and feel the secret to the sublime is micromanaging all the elements to the macro-managed whole—so everything is “touched” and “alive”, and tried to do this here, allowing my “right brain” to direct my instinct listening to the book and the music, while my left brain also controlled my brush. The creator of the Muppets Jim Henson believed that, like in his Fraggle Rock series, there were whole worlds just beyond ours, and loving the American Transcendentalist spirit of transcendence of nature (and teaching comics for over 30 years!) it’s fun to “see” other dimensions and worlds in the optical abstractions suggested by the minutiae of an image. I think part of the power of cartoons is that our inner brain doesn’t have the details of memory to render in our minds eye the exactitude of representations—so if we could project our dreams on a screen we might see essentialized forms, “smiley faces” and the like, and project onto them meaning (that’s grandpa!). When we are looking at clouds, or any other super detailed information, to make sense of it, as human being animals, just as a survival skill to see ancient predators, our inner mind might organize the information to cognize faces, forms, other “recognizable” figurative subjects. I don’t want to make up the images I see, but use the reference of what I’m looking at, like Cézanne looking at nature, as like a “map” to project my own unconsciously derived forms and figures. That’s what’s happening here in the details of the image—but allegorically, also like to think that this is the inner world of Los Angeles as a buzzing beehive of activity, the collective unconscious of the many different peoples and energy working and forming the city that lives and breathes onto its own.
Los Angeles, like critical theorist Jean Baudrillard states in his America, is a city that is in “in love with its limitless horizontality”, and like in his Simulations, posits the city as a simulacrum of a civilization that was built on the false promise of good health and wellness, importing water and its people to build a utopia—that many see now as a dystopia—of the California Dream. I’m grateful, after a lifetime of wanting to live in Southern California, to finally be here—but after being in the center of everything in Manhattan for 25 years, my husband and I wonderfully live in the middle of nowhere in the desert region of Riverside, coming in twice a week to teach at USC and to visit for art events and exhibitions. I love the teeming city, but also am a little overwhelmed by it, in a sublime way that makes me feel a small part of a much bigger thing, and ultimately feel I belong here. The art world is behind the front lines of the cultural enterprises of movies, television, music and more, and there is much freedom here to riff off the machinations that help to inform global culture and ideology—it feels like America on testosterone—and I ultimately hope the vibrancy, power, and optimistic energy of how Los Angeles can help bring us into a positive future with its great influence, is depicted here (and I signed my name like a tag in graffiti in the corner, just to claim my space!)
When I was a kid growing up in the 70’s (I was born in 1966, am 58 now), I (and most of my friends!) was obsessed with Cheech & Chong, the famous comedy duo known for their irreverent, bohemian, and although ostensibly not PC to today’s standards—but in other ways very PC outrageous comedy. I had all the records, which I loved playing and listening to by myself and with my friends and went to all the movies—I truly can say, culturally speaking, that I grew up with Cheech & Chong (although I was too young probably for some of the humor!) and that they affected my life, in deep, intrinsic ways.
I got to meet Cheech in 2016 when I began teaching at USC Roski, where I am a tenured, full time Professor of Art (and also keep real for popular culture by teaching Comics and I began a Visual Narrative Art program) through Roski board member Homeira Goldstein, who helped bring Cheech’s collection to the Manhattan Beach Art Center in 2016, when Andrew Madrid, my husband (who is Latino—we’ve been together now for almost 34 years!) went to the opening and to the reception at Homeira’s house. I mentioned to Cheech at the party, that while obviously not gay, that Cheech & Chong influenced and changed my life, as their records and movies that celebrated their brotherhood, which Cheech seemed to appreciate (I also recited to him, by ancient memory now from when I was a kid, one of his routines, which he also appreciated, eyes partially rolled!). Tommy Chong, while not exactly Caucasian—his father is Chinese, his mom a Canadian of Irish/Scottish origin—lived, as an adult, with this fantastic Latino super confident and funny man, and they had a blast being roommates, doing all their activities and antics together, a true bromance in every way. I truly believe this set a model for myself—while “drugs are bad” and I hope that my life with Andrew isn’t as subproletariat as theirs, in the sense that these were two men who loved each other and were “free”, thumbing their nose at conventional and conservative society, living the life they chose to live with liberty, happiness, and justice for all set the tone for what became my life, living with my wonderful Latino husband, currently in Riverside, CA (very near Andrew’s family—but also Cheech’s museum of Latino/Chicano art, “The Cheech”!). I was also so happy to see Cheech again in 2017—I was a professor sitting behind him with the rest of the Roski faculty as Cheech gave his inspiring convocation speech for the Roski graduation in 2017, and having conversation with him after—Cheech’s speech was awesome, as he grew up near where USC is, and had a lot of inspiring words for growing up with humor, aspirations, and drive to achieve one’s goals while making the world a better place.
Knowing Cheech is a hero for us all, and personally so monumental for my own life, I was moved to create this painting for Karma LA show, “My American Dream: City of Angels”. The painting is an appropriation of an image from the famous scene from their 1978 movie “Up in Smoke” where they have been pulled over. The painting has two of the titles of their most famous routines “Dave’s Not Here” and “Earache My Eye” hidden in the fake fur of their lowrider, and Chong is saying “Hey Man” and Cheech “Ay Caramba!” I am a narrative artist, where the paintings “talk with one another” and are installed next to one another in a non-linear fashion, to tell the story of Keith’s “American Dream” that have icons such as Mr. Marin, social activists and cultural leaders, and landscapes of current and past of U.S. history that has allowed Andrew and myself to be husbands, in a country that can hopefully still be considered “great” despite, or in face of, the rising political tumult of the far right. I hope this work is in opposition to this, and about Democracy and cultural and political rights and awareness, which obviously Cheech is part of, both in his work and leadership, and his collection of Chicano art and the Cheech Museum.
While painting, I listened to all their comedy albums, more than a few times, in addition to watching all their films (and old videos of their routines filmed in clubs on Youtube, which were revelatory to see their dynamism and true avant garde comedy and great energy that made them famous). I also listened to the excellent autobiography on Audible of Cheech’s Cheech is not My Real Name, which was fascinating and insightful. Cheech originally wanted to be an artist, influenced by a great teacher, and studied ceramics, going to Canada to escape the draft and work with a famous ceramist there before going off on his own and meeting Chong, who was already an established musician and promoter, before going fully into comedy with Cheech as a duo. Their new brand of iconoclast, drug and bohemian based humor touched a nerve and they, after moving to Los Angeles and working intensively at clubs and promoting themselves and their work, became a sensation for the hippy and alternative boomers (and kids like me!) in America and all throughout the world.
This is the iconic scene from their first film, 1978’s Up in Smoke, where Cheech has somehow the hitchhiking Chong, who is in drag (“this is the only way I can get someone to pick me up!”), for a woman, and Chong, in new friendship and generosity, gives Cheech (mistakenly) a bunch of acid, and he himself has swallowed a bunch of drugs to evade the cops that have just pulled them over, and who are about to question and take them in. This scene was developed first in clubs, where their pantomime and timing were hilarious, and then on their albums (the first was in 1971—that had the “Dave’s Not Here” sketch that is quoted in the fur of the lowrider), and so by the time of the film they were huge stars). “Earache My Eye”, also in the fur, was a skit/song that was a huge hit for kids my age and older, from the Wedding Album on 1974 (that Cheech wears, in punk/hippy triumph a tutu/drag getup on the penultimate “battle of the bands”—the Germs are also one of the acts—at the end of Up in Smoke, that I used to “air guitar” to in my bedroom mirror!). Moved by comics, and wanting to bring new life to the image, I have Cheech saying, “Hey Man!” in his beard, and Cheech saying “ay caramba” (oh no in Spanish). In pre Renaissance paintings, such by Jan van Eyck, characters in works would also be “talking” with words coming from their mouths way before comic strips were a medium, and I hope to combine the two genres here—the words “whatever man” resolves the conflict in the fur at the base of the window, much in the same nonchalant, non-stressed manner Cheech would ultimately come to peaceful “live and let live” resolutions. I hope Cheech wouldn’t mind that I changed, in the back window, written backwards, the word “Machine” (from the words on the back window of original car) from “Love Machine” to my own last name “Mayerson” as I’ve enjoyed placing/hiding my signature such as Arcimboldo used to do in his Renaissance fruit men portraits!
Beyond bringing legalizing marijuana to prominence as an activist battle, decades before it actually happened, and while some of the well-intentioned humor might not pass the “PC Police” today, the overwhelming majority of Cheech & Chong’s humor and spirit were very much about the celebration of diversity, class, and the American spirit of questioning authority and fighting for what you believe in for freedom of all peoples to co-exist in harmony and peace. They were a wellspring for the boomers to come of age, dealing with conservative America by laughing at it and stridently defining outdated conventions, and they were hilarious, much of the humor holding up and their films—true indie movie and at times experimental and edgy—have had generations holding them close to their hearts as “cult classics”.
Cheech has become a true hero for America, for Latino/Chicano culture and beyond. He has maintained a super successful career, and has worked hard, in a real “American Dream” spirit, making the most of all the wonderful intelligence and talent for acting and comedy he has. His film Born in East LA was years ahead of its time for celebrating the immigrant story, and his roles in movies and television (including a long run with Don Johnson in the great tv show Nash Bridges) have had an ongoing influence for future generations, with prominent Latino representation for Hollywood and the World. I love that he beat Anderson Cooper on Jeopardy, and whether his own star or portraying characters in animated films, Cheech can maintain his centrality throughout decades of genius work.
His collection of Chicano art is a revelation. When we first saw it in Long Beach, it blew Andrew and I away—the amazing depth of the collection is incredible, but also the pertinence, beauty, narrative storytelling, and sublimity was out of this world. Bittersweetly, so much of it could be in any prominent “Artforum” platform contemporary gallery and triumph—but up until recently, much of these artists were neglected by the mainstream, all too white artworld, until now. Thanks to collectors and influencers like Cheech Marin, artist activists and others who are striving for DEI in our artworld, the ideology and move towards celebrating generations of artists and cultural creators of color has dynamically come about for contemporary art, galleries, and museums. I’m so grateful that Cheech brought his collection to Riverside California, taking over an old library and turning it into a cultural center and museum for California and the Inland Empire. For a few years, just before it opened, Andrew and I lived directly down the street from the location, in downtown Riverside, five minutes away from the Cheech (and the famous hotel across the street The Mission Inn, and UC Riverside and more). Interestingly, Jackson Pollock had also lived nearby with his family in his teen years and would go to the Mission Inn with his brother Charles and be inspired by the art! Now, Riverside is coming back as a fantastic city, celebrating Latino representation with residents, shop owners, and government (one of the reasons we loved living there!), with now the Cheech at its center.
Andrew and I now moved about ½ hour away, to the Lake Elsinore area, just on the other side of the neighborhood where we owned his families cabin they had for generations, and now nearby his family—mother, sister, siblings, and now families of nephews and his niece and their kids—who all consider me an uncle, as I’ve known and loved them since they were the age of their own toddlers! Who knows how my life might have been different without Cheech & Chong, but I’m so glad that they were such a huge influence, giving me the vision and ideology to live the way I do now with my Latino husband (although drugs are bad!). Genre painting by Frans Hals and more have also been an influence—paintings of everyday life, the bohemian allure of how people really live in the “high” world of Fine Art Oil Painting—and this work hopefully participates, in a very contemporary way, of depicting the scenes that most of America goes through—hopefully in good ways (being profiled by police for being different is another dark side of this work). I hope my painting celebrates Cheech & Chong, but also the rich cultural diversity (including LGBTQIA ?!) worlds that most of America has now embraced and cherishes—in the face of some of the greatest threats known to democracy in history.
This is an appropriation of the famous SkateBoarder magazine, from 1975, with Brad Logan on the cover in Sundance, in the first issue of the magazine to feature the Dogtown articles—Aspects of the Downhill Slide by Carlos Izan with photos by Craig “CR” Stecyk with photos by Glen Friedman. By the 1970’s, the skateboard phenomena had died down, but it was this duo, and their coverage, encouragement, and impresario of the Zepher skateboard team (the Z-boys) that revolutionized the sport and changed American culture. Stecyk was a partner for the skateboard shop and company that created the boards the kids rode on, and Friedman was a young skater who took pictures of his cohort (and later the seminal LA punk bands). Together, with Surf Magazines latest spinoff SkateBoarder, they were able to document the young rebels of the then bohemian and working-class world of Santa Monica to create images of freedom and long-haired exuberance (and radical new skating techniques and tricks) of the group, and guided them in their dress, routines, and lifestyles. Brad Logan, from Hermosa Beach, featured on the cover, wasn’t a part of this group, but still was considered one of the “first families of Skateboarding,” with his famous nose wheelie, which he and his family perfected in North San Diego County in La Costa and the Black Hill.
Growing up in the suburbs of Denver, Colorado, far from the ocean but still in the cool area of recreational sports and liberal youth culture, in the 70’s and 80’s all the kids wanted to live in California and would bring surfboards to high school even when it was snowing out, wearing corduroy OP shorts and baseball caps and wearing Vuarnet sunglasses. SkateBoarder was like a bible, and the punk rock kids that I hung out with would skate in parking lots and empty pools at night. I would go with them, and although I was a pretty good skier, I was an uncoordinated, not out (even to myself) gay kid, and would skate along with them sliding on my stomach (stupid and even more dangerous in retrospect!). But I listened and loved that music—like in the seminal “Over the Edge” soundtrack Cheap Trick, Hendrix, the Cars, and the Ramones—and later, I was a tween Deadhead, sliding into early 80’s punk (which also celebrated community as much as the Dead parking lot culture!), and saw Black Flag, X, and the early amazing punk rock bands that would come through Denver and play afternoon shows. I was kind of a preppy, but would hide my duffle bag with my Gang of Four t-shirt under a shrub in the front lawn, and change into it in the car going to slam dance at all ages afternoon shows in downtown Denver at the Mercury Café, near Wax Trax records, coming home covered in sweat and telling my folks I went to a jazz concert and we danced a lot and it was really hot.
While painting this I listened to all this music, played and found new and old docs and skateboarding films (Dogtown and Z-Boys and the biopic Lords of Dogtown especially, but also great old films and docs on YouTube), and read the book DogTown: The Legend of the Z-Boys by Steck and Friedman and more. I love Van Gogh and Turner, and feel that, our job when rendering from photos is to penetrate the photo rather than paint the surface of it and wanted to get “inside” beyond the patina of the frayed cover of the image like when I and so many kids would gaze into the image of the surface of these magazines wanting to be transported and part of that culture. Still, where I live in Riverside CA, we have tract home suburbia’s being built up around us, much like it was back in the Robert Adams world I grew up in 70’s suburban Denver, and like the background of this image, kids trying to find their own American Dream in these fledgling universes of American families.
Sunset at Seal Rock is from my own photo, from when I lived in Laguna Beach for the Fall 2021-Spring 2022 season when my husband and I were between houses and living in an apartment looking over the ocean. I had gone for Chinese food at my favorite restaurant for takeout on PCH, and while I was waiting for my order, there was this beautiful sunset, so I walked down to the beach and took this photo, from a series of photos and videos at this surprise sublime occasion.
Seal Rock is famous at Laguna Beach for being these rocky outgrowths where seals and sea lions, and all numbers of herring birds and pelicans rest, about 120 offshore Crescent Bay Beach, a large cove about ¼ mile in length, were Cliff Drive intercepts North Coast Highway. People aren’t allowed on the rocks, which also have dangerous surf conditions that make the tide pools inaccessible, and amidst the otherwise bucolic and serene incredible ocean views, there is something prehistoric and timeless about this landscape, as it’s overwhelmed with these sea creatures, like something out of a Charles Knight dinosaur mural at the New York Natural History Museum. With the intense sunset and cloud formations, it also seemed to me a bit post-apocalyptic, like an end scene of revelations, after nature and God have swallowed up mankind to give it back to the ocean and animals.
Shot from an iPhone, as part of the HEIC image from a short “live” photo/video, there was also some cool distortion that happened in the image, where pixels/visual noise helped to comprise the image, especially in the water that had so many tiny waves as the tide was rolling in. I like painting the pixels as if they are “real”, and thinking about the impressionists and Cézanne–if I can render the visual noise as I interpret it in a painterly way, perhaps like them, I can paint not only a scene that from far away looks “real” (like looking at this image on one’s phone!) but also, when looking close up, allowing my unconscious to spill through, like when Cézanne is painting his famous Mont Sainte-Victoire and using the forms and colors he sees as a map for his subconscious to take over, breaking up the forms into abstraction.
While painting this, I found that Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys had the exact right tenor for the image, and obsessively listened to their oeuvre when I was obsessively painting. There is such a melancholic beauty to their music (albeit when focusing on the Brian Wilson written music more than later hits like Kokomo!), when they too were focused on Southern California and the sublimity of everyday life, finding like Proust, ways into the reflections of memories and moods within the lyrics with their incredible instrumentation and harmonies. For me, painting from photo images is like Proust’s famous Madeleines: biting into this French butter cake cookie, sends Proust into a reverie of memories that constitute his amazing huge novel In Search of Lost Time, as for me, using the photographic image becomes a talisman for my own memories and feelings, hoping that in my own way, to bring out the poetry and the painterly between the tooth-and-comb of the formal puzzle pieces of the composition, especially for an image like this, with the cloud undulations, rocks with animals, and sea ebbs and flows.
I also love the anthropomorphic landscapes of the 17th century, from the Netherlands in particular, where they were marking humankind’s place on earth by turning landscapes into faces and figures, and extending into the landscapes of Thomas Cole, who made cliff sides into faces, and love the work of the symbolists and Romantic visionaries (including artists, thinking specifically of for this work, the British Romantic visionary artist Samuel Palmer, influenced by Blake, who would obsessively find figures and forms in his foliage and landscapes), Charles Burchfield, and even Thomas Cole and the American Transcendentalist spirit, that could find other spiritual lives in nature. Da Vinci said that an artist always paints themselves—I think he might have meant, for portraits, sometimes the painter ends up painting pictures that ultimately might look more like their creator than whom they are portraying—but I also think, in micromanaged moments in the old masters, and especially In Modernist painting, from Van Gogh and further, where it was less important to make things look “real” (photography already did that!), it was how an artist projected themselves (and their subconscious!) onto the subject matter, and interior faces, feelings, synesthetic atmospheres emerge. If you look at Van Gogh’s Cypress trees, you can see interior realized, iconic forms of his face, same with Cezanne’s “holes” in the middle of his canvases, where almost like mirrors, were in front of his face while he used painting as a meditation—that look like “inner masks” of the man—mustache, beard, eyes, and more.
My husband Andrew and I have been together for over 33 years and had first met when I was in the UC Irvine MFA program in 1992, and I had lived just a few blocks away from this new apartment back then, and it was our “honeymoon” period. Andrew had grown up nearby Laguna, and since that time it was his getaway for he and his friends. Orange County is notoriously conservative, but since the 60’s, Laguna Beach was both a hippie—and queer haven. When I was in grad school, Laguna Beach was relatively inexpensive to live, and the Comp Lit students and myself lived in the area—me with my Brown University undergrad friend—we had both been Semiotics majors at Brown (in addition to Studio Art for me). Derrida and Lyotard were teaching at UCI—one of the reasons I went to UCI was not only Catherine Lord had just come from Cal Arts and was firing the old guard and hiring a new faculty that were very much a part of the famous 1993 “gender and identity politics” Whitney Biennial—and I could also take classes with these great philosophers! My gay friend and I realized that we hadn’t done anything “gay” in Laguna Beach—which at the time was the oasis for gay people in the region and went to the most famous gay bar there—the Boom Boom Room, where I first met Andrew. Despite the name, this was an old queer bar that was quite demure—older gay men with their Izod collars up, fish nets and fake starfish on the walls, booths with Archie and Reggie cartoon cutouts on the side, and a small dance floor with a Saturday Night Fever disco light floor and mirror ball, with an elderly bearded guy dancing holding tissues in his hands. Andrew, who is part Indigenousness and Latino, looked just like Keanu Reeves, my star crush, and we instantly hit it off, going to a party afterwards and talking about art, life and culture and falling in love (he later also helped me when I curated the first LGBTQIA+ film and video festival in Orange County at UCI—“Behind the Orange Curtain”! He basically lived at my house, and we would snorkel in the fabulous coral reefs and have an incredible, young and romantic time in one of the most beautiful beach havens on earth.
Now, Laguna Beach, especially since the notorious same titled reality series in the later 90’s, is completely changed—a haven for Rich White People from all over internationally, with multi-million-dollar homes, expensive restaurants and boutiques, and no gay bars or hippies, but still the ocean is still there and some holdouts of the earlier bohemian era. Back in the early 1900’s it began as an artist’s retreat, and the California Regionalist painting movement had begun there –in fact, one of the leaders of the what became a movement, art colony and subsequently the “Laguna Beach Art Association” from 1918-1935 was the amazing landscape artist William Wendt—the “Dean of Southern California Landscape Painters”, who by cosmic serendipity, lived in a house directly across from our apartment! I love these artists, and visiting the Laguna Beach Art Museum, which was begun by the Association when it had grown Laguna Beach to be a major, nationally and internationally known art colony. USC Roski, where I am a full tenured professor, and while living in Laguna until recently, I was the Chair of Painting, Drawing, and Printmaking, is the oldest art school in the country, and it was began by Southern California landscape painters from this very same era, so I feel I’m in direct lineage to all of this group and ideology, who were also inspired by the Impressionists, but much too of Romantic and European art movements. I hope that it’s possible to create landscape painting in our current day and age that aren’t “cheesy” and in a negative way, like in the current tourist Laguna galleries, by going to the heart of what these wonderful painters were doing in a “pure era” (albeit, we now should always put this into a critical historic and political context, as they were mostly white colonialists, some like Wendt, who was German, from Europe), inspired by the visionary and poetic aspects of what could be brought to this sublime landscape—the ocean, despite gentrification, pollution, and global warming—is still timeless. In my meditation thinking of all these things while painting Sunset at Seal Rock I hope to have painted something meaningful, not just for myself, but for others that is pertinent to our time, but hopefully timeless.
Space Jam is the original 1996 movie that featured Michael Jordan, featuring the Looney Tunes gang. The plot is that Bugs Bunny and friends abduct Jordan to help them play basketball against a team of aliens (the Munstars!) that were threatening to enslave the Looney Tunes to work at an amusement park on their planet—and to save our planet from the aliens in general. Although it was inspired by Nike Air Jordan ads that had Bugs and crew alongside Jordan, and opened to mixed reviews, it was a huge commercial success—the highest grossing basketball film of all time, and the tenth highest grossing film of that year. It influenced generations of young people and was one of the first films (alongside Roger Rabbit) that successfully integrated live action and cartoon characters in the same sequences, in a modernized way that went way beyond the Mary Poppins era.
In real life, after a semi-retirement after his beloved father had been murdered, Jordan about to enter the second phase of his glorious career after retiring from basketball to play baseball, his original goal as a child, influenced by his dad, which they reference in the movie. The Warner Brothers company created a basketball court just for Jordan, who would play his famous friends in “pickup games” during the filming of the movie, which inspired him to go back to the Chicago Bulls and resume his heroic basketball career.
While painting this, I listened to the biography Michael Jordan: The Life by Roland Lazenby and watched/listened to all the Netflix docuseries The Last Dance about the Chicago Bulls last championship season with Jordan (on my laptop in the background, twice!), all the Jordan interviews I could find on Netflix, and more. I also listened to Wild Minds: The Artists and Rivalries that Inspired the Golden Age of Animation by Reid Mitenbuler, and watched and listened to in my studio while painting the Television Academy long interviews of Warner Brothers animation directors Chuck Jones, Fritz Freleng, and interviews with Bob Clampett and more. When not painting, I watched documentaries of the infamous Termite Terrace that the Warner Bros animators began in, and more. While painting each of the Looney Tunes characters, I would watch the best of their own specific cartoons they starred in to “get into character”, while of course rendering Michael Jordan watching his docs and listening to his interviews.
While I’m a stereotypical gay man when it comes to sports and didn’t watch them growing up as much as I watched cartoons, I have a deep respect for athletes, and for Michael Jordan in particular. I have painted many images of LeBron James, as he is also of course a legend, but also for (like Billie Jean King in this City of Angels show) an athlete who has done an incredible amount of good for civil rights and the world. While Jordan was less political overtly, he as a living superhero—someone who had almost the ability to fly—and he was in control of his own agency and career and has been an incredible businessman. He is an inspiration to us all—we all want to be the “Michael Jordan” of whatever it is we are involved in and doing. I always tell the students they must be “Beyonce about it” where she is in control of her business as well as her art, and is command of her agency, in much different than the way someone like Marilyn Monroe was. My pithy epiphany of Post Modernism is about how agency—who we are as people or as souls—has been reified—folded like flour into pizza dough—of the Capitalist Machine. When Warhol was making his silkscreens of icons like Marilyn or Elvis I feel he was doing the same thing—making them into non-living, flattened out versions of themselves (and their tragedy of how their own agency was flattened out by the corporate capital machine of culture). For me, I want to bring out the real person behind the persona, to honor them and who they were and how they affected culture, even for cartoon characters—but also very importantly, for heroes such as Michael Jordan. Like in the movie Space Jam, he was brought into the Capitalist Machine, but he was able to have complete control and power to become even more himself, and wildly successful using the machinations of the Machine to his advantage.
Much has been written and documented about Jordan to try to summarize here, but suffice it to say that for me he is the epitome of the American Dream, coming from a family encouraging his “ten thousand hours” to be a master of his game, and striving to be the absolute best throughout his career, from high school through post basketball retirement, raising the Chicago Bulls from a third rate team to the best in the world, and leading them to six NBA championships, making basketball and the NBA popular around the world, and being the undisputed “best basketball player of all time,” a global icon. He also, by his own choice, a powerful businessman, from a young player collaborating with Nike to create generations of Air Jordans (among many other endorsements), being part owner of other basketball teams and car racing organizations, to become the first billionaire in NBA history, winning the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama. He has been his entire life an incredible leader who has inspired millions of people, civil rights, and myself as an artist to be the absolute best I can be to help the world.
In the history of animation, Warner Brothers cartoons also started out as a rogue team of animators, coming from Disney and other larger outfits at the time, to work at Warner Brothers, where Leon Schlesinger, the producer of Warner’s Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies a distant relative of the Warner Brothers, didn’t really care or get involved deeply with what the animators were doing, as long as they were making money for the studio. Although they were disregarded and treated by the higher ups poorly, this also gave them tremendous freedom to create what they wanted. Disney had become somewhat staid in their animation, which based all their figures on real anatomy, with weight and volume, and their more wholesome stories to appeal to children and families. At Warner Brothers, they embraced the rubbery forms and movements of how animation could literally expand the plastic properties of characters to stretch and bend with the emotions and feelings they were projecting, and while also character and personality driven action, the stories and ideas were more subversive, laugh-out-loud funny and satiric for their times. The Warner Brothers animators were doing what the Disney animators wished they could create, to make the icons and cartoons that were originally shown before features back in the 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s, but are now classic staples on television for generations, spawning more animation as the characters literally have lives of their won into the future.
In Space Jam, there are no sequences ironically in the movie itself when you see all the Looney Tunes characters in one frame alongside Michael Jordan! This is an appropriation of a 1997 print that they sold in the Warner Brothers gift stores “gallery”, by unknown artists working for the company, signed by Jordan. They used a photo of Jordan, mixed in with the Looney Tunes gang, and the digital components of the audience of old Warner Brothers side characters they used in the movie, which seemed to cut and paste the same characters over again in different places to fill in the dozens of people in the seats. Bugs Bunny, whom I’ve painted before (the family that sold the Duccio masterpiece “Madonna and Child” to the Met acquired this work almost twenty years ago in Brussels—I would like to think with some of the money they got from the Duccio!) I’ve always felt was a queer character—he was a bachelor, with seemingly little romantic interest in the other sex, but was often in drag, kissing Elmer Fudd and others, and a hero—he never struck back unless he himself was thwarted, and had a homosocial/” buddy” relationship with Daffy Duck. Bugs was a hero, like Errol Flynn meets Charlie Chaplin and Groucho Marx, not afraid of anyone or anything. Daffy was the everyman that the heroic Bugs wasn’t—Chuck Jones would say he would want to be Bugs, but most likely we are all like Daffy, with his neurosis and anxiety and ego. Lola Bunny, the female rabbit in the image was created for the movie, based a bit on Honey Bunny, the female (very rarely, mostly in merchandizing and in one Bugs cartoon) companion for Bugs. Lola was created as a “merchandizing character” too, and as a strong female protagonist for the film, the would-be sweetheart for Bugs (and the equivalent of more voluptuous Jessica Rabbit from 1981’s humans meet toons Roger Rabbit). In the movie, she is a no-nonsense tomboy, great athlete, and completely in control of her own agency, a welcomed, feminist presence for the group (later, brought even more to eccentric life voiced by Kristian Wiig in The Looney Tunes Show of 2011-4). Tweety is the famous yellow canary, originally created by Warner Bros directors Friz Freleng and Bob Clampett as the foil for Sylvester the cat. I have always thought of Tweety as queer, as he is gender bending in every way—despite the violence that occurs sometimes fending off Sylvester’s obsessive desire to consume him—he display’s feminine characteristics and performs in ways that defy gender stereotypes. And Sylvester, while aggressively male, is devoted to getting Tweety, so what is that about (and performed in ways that put his maleness in critical positions). The Tasmanian Devil, otherwise known as “Taz,” was created by later Warner Bros director Robert McKimson, first appearing in 1954, and only appearing in five of the shorts was disliked by then producer Edward Selzer to shelve the character, thinking it was too violent for children, but was a fan favorite, having a cult-like status for generations and now a staple in the Warner Bros cosmology. Mostly all id (and having a female companion “the She Devil” who looks just like Taz in drag), Taz has a rambunctious whirling demeanor, easily swayed and not so smart, but in contemporary times, a heart of gold. I would think of all these characters individually while painting them, trying to bring them to life like the animators would in drawing and performing them. While painting the dozens of characters in the background, I was listening/watching the best of Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies in my own background, where many of them appear, but also thinking of the history of American animation, listening to that book and where we are today. Despite any subjective interpretation on my part, the Looney Toons gang is a bunch of misfits, but with Jordan at the helm, they were able to overcome all and win the day (and even save the aliens from their own subjugation!)—and Space Jam the movie helped, with Jordan’s great appeal, to rebrand, reboot, and revitalize the Warner Bros cartoons for new generations, continuing today (as the movie has now become a kids film canon staple!).
I started out being the “comics kid” on campus, from rendering a “submarine sandwich” as a real submarine when in kindergarten for the elementary school paper, to creating the daily strip (and most all the illustration for everything) when I was an undergraduate at Brown University in the 80’s. I thought I would be a cartoonist for the New Yorker upon graduating, but working (I did a lot of editorial in college, including being the editor of the weekend magazine) at an art magazine, and then a blue chip gallery—Robert Miller (that represented my art heroes, Mapplethorpe and Basquiat right after they died) realized I wanted to bring up ideas aesthetically via fine art (I was a Semiotics and Studio Art major at Brown, and wrote and directed plays). But I’ve “kept it real for comics” by teaching comics since my graphic novel (a collaboration with the writer Dennis Cooper) was published in 1996, as the lead comics teacher and “Cartooning Coordinator” at the School of Visual Arts in New York City (historical for comics since its inception), in addition to teaching fine art at NYU, Columbia, Yale, Brown, Brooklyn College and more. The University of Southern California recruited me to teach both fine art and comics eight years ago, and I am now a full tenured Professor of Art there. During the Kavanaugh hearings, I realized I had so many students from the School of Cinematic Arts Animation and Gaming departments, and I was also friends with Don Bacigalupi, the then President of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, that I should start a Visual Narrative Art program and department (I am also honored that my work is now also part of their permanent collection!). Hopefully our own art “makes the world a better place”, but teaching does, and when students go out into the world with their creative and critical skills, it truly makes a difference. I’ve had many a SVA grad (and fine arts students!) make work that has been important (i.e., one of my students, also in the permanent collection of the Lucas Museum is Nate Powell, who illustrated MARCH, the trilogy by Sen. John Lewis about his involvement with the Civil Rights movement) and who, with the millennial generation have become storyboard artists, art directors and directors for animation and more in Hollywood. Like Lucas, I’m a believer in Joseph Campbell, and to paraphrase him, “an artist job is to tell stories for a culture to understand itself in order for the culture to progress” and my students have done this. I am proud that I have taught thousands of comics students in my career (more than any other at SVA, and maybe the world?!), and like Disney, who felt art education was imperative for his animators (a USC professor was one of the first teachers for the Disney studios, which then began Cal Arts in part to train their animators), have developed my program (against the pushback of the Roski old guard who felt that “comics aren’t art”?!) at USC Roski. Still fledgling, but with 9 classes in place and over 100 students, the program is making millions for USC, and teaching student how think critically like artists, but bringing up their ideas in both narrative art and comics, illustration, and working in collaboration with SCA’s Animation and Gaming Depts, and as an interdisciplinary minor with also Dramatic Arts and the Dornsife/English departments, it has been a tremendous success, and hopefully will become its own department by the time the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, whom I’m also working in collaboration with, open its doors in late 2025.
We all want to become the “Michael Jordan” of whatever it is we do, to hopefully make the world a better place. In context of the show, here Michael Jordan is helping the Looney Tunes gang save themselves and the planet from the alien “Munstars” but hopefully we can all be the best we can be to save the planet and ourselves from the badness of humanity and what we have done to our world and people. By being our best, by being leaders in our culture and humanity, we can strive to rise above our fears to achieve our hopes and dreams (and democracy!) to get over the hump of our currently tumultuous moment and to “live happily ever after”!
The Phoenix Lights is an image taken from a frame from the famous video of the “second wave” phenomena of the Phoenix Lights from 1997. On March 13th of that year, the first UFO that tens of thousands of people witnessed was a boomerang shaped shadow, with lights underneath, sliding silently over the night sky soon after 8 pm, moving slowly from the north to the south, with sightings not only from Phoenix, but in its trajectory over Arizona from Phoenix and Tuscan. This second phenomena which too was witness by many, including by Mike Kryston recorded for posterity in video from his backyard, was floating orbs of orange lights appearing in a line, over the city, which then disappeared, in a separate order, while keeping their alignment and slow side moving trajectory. The Airforce tried to explain away the phenomena by saying they were military flares from a plane—but flares drop at different rates from parachutes and not from the distance recorded—in a perfect line. This video has been included in in many documentaries and news and networks from all around the world.
There was an onslaught of disturbed and excited populace who demanded answers, and the phones for 911 and other calls were overwhelming. It was one of the most seen and famous examples of mass UFO sightings in history. The huge balls of amber lights were documented by many, appearing in lines and formation as if they were on a single craft, an eerie silence as if time were stopped was felt by the witnesses, different from any planes and in formation, too close to one another to be helicopters or planes and too bright to be drones, becoming one of the most iconic sitings. Many pilots saw the lights along with civilians (some who saw the triangle shape of the first phenomena just 30 feet above their heads) and the government had the infamous coverup of “the flare theory” (which also leave prominent smoke trails not seen here). The then Arizona Governor Fife Symington held a contentious press conference soon, thereafter, having one of his people dressed in an alien Halloween costume that he demasks, in attempt to squelch people’s anxieties and fervor. But he has since “come out” that he, a former Air Force pilot, witnessed the “breathtaking” “huge craft” coming over Piesta Peak, unlike anything he has ever seen—unquestionably a UFO in his own words.
Now that the government has admitted the existence of UFO’s, we are in an amazing moment in history. We know the world isn’t flat, nor is it the center of the universe, and we have to finally admit, after decades of disinformation and conspiracy coverups, that the existence of UFO’s (or UAP’s—Unidentified Ariel Phenomena as they are now called to sidestep the baggage of the UFO term over the years) is real—the Pentagon, Air Force pilots, and testimonies to Congress by credible official people have admitted this. The agnostic approach is to say that we don’t know WHAT literally they are—not little grey aliens from outer space piloting them necessarily—but there are strange objects moving around our airspace, that perform in ways for which our current technology can’t account for or explain.
I love Turner, and the way he would work with the current science of his day to create scenes from nature to be able to understand and render with exactitude the weather and movements of nature in his landscapes, but also Cézanne and how he would render his Mont Sainte Victoire allowing for his unconscious to guide his brush, mapping onto the strangeness of far-away forms his subconscious memories and dreamworlds. I also love the Hudson River School artists, making history paintings of landscapes that were imbued with the fantasies of Westward expansion (for better or for worse!). Here, I chose a frame from the famous video the Phoenix Lights in a documentary about that seemed to have the best compositional alignment and “real” color from the actual video and printed it out large and glossy on my high-res printer. It was a monochromatic image from the vintage 90’s video and camera taken at night, and there was a lot of “noise” on the surface of the image as the old camera was trying to focus on the lights. I love painting the pixels and the noise as if it is “real”, and like Cézanne, using this to map what my unconscious brings to the image. I learned long ago when painting a historic photo from the James Dean crash site (a promised gift to LACMA) that when working from historical photos, there feels to be a lot of energy surrounding the elements of the image. Not that I am a “medium” “channeling” anything, but looking at images like this, which have been pondered by millions of people, there is a certain energy that gets transmuted when I’m painting that translates to the painterliness of the image.
When painting, I try to focus my right brain by having my left brain listen to audiobooks and music playlists while I render. For this, I was listening in part to the 2011 book UFO’s: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record by Leslie Kean, who helped to break the bombshell reporting about UAPS and our government’s knowledge and involvement that was in the historic article from Dec. 16, 2017 “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O Program” that was the first major article to reveal their acknowledgement and involvement with the phenomena. I also listened to music that inspired me about the phenomena and what that moment might have been like, such as Brian Eno’s great “Apollo:; Atmospheres and Soundtracks”, that was the original soundtrack for the documentary For All Mankind about the first Apollo astronauts, along with the music of Phillip Glass and more.
When my mind’s eye starts to see forms and figures in the noise, I realize this is in part my mind cognizing and organizing the information it is trying to read by relatable memory iconic motifs: faces, eyes, forms. I try my best not to further “illustrate” what I see, but bring out from the original photographic image what truly seems to be “there”. Of course, I realize I have aliens, space and other worlds on my mind, and try to let my mind flow in whatever direction it seems to pulsate while not being too cheesy or stereotypical as I’m channeling into the image, hoping for transcendence and the big meanings of the ineffable sublime to emerge, like being witness through the photo of the actual event that captivated so many.
I went to Monument Valley last summer, in 2023, specifically to get this image on a photo journey that I have been hoping to take for many years and now for this exhibition. I’m a John Ford fan, and grew up in Colorado, loving the American West and all representations of it, and wanted to take an image and feel the environment to make for me the ultimate Western landscape. The Denver Art Museum wasn’t as good and as contemporary as it is today in the 70’s and 80’s when I visited as a child, and I was too naïve to appreciate their amazing collection of Western art that I love now. I’m a big into the Hudson River School and those works, but also specifically the landscapes of Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran and Thomas Hill that they have in their collection, in addition to treasures of Western art (despite and acknowledging all the politically problematic themes they can bring into discourse of Western colonialism).
In any event, I was excited, and after some thwarted attempts (plans to go in the winter when there turned out to be blizzards and storms!), got into my Porsche Spyder convertible and drove out to Arizona and Utah (en route ultimately to visit my folks in Denver). I’ve painted the Grand Canyon (which I visited on the way), Yosemite (also a Moran subject, of course) many times, but have never visited Monument Valley, which I’ve yearned to visit since I was small. Listening to the Grateful Dead all the way (I’m the only gay Deadhead I know!) I was in the perfect mood (although I’m a full tenured Professor of Art at the University of Southern California, Roski School of Art and Design, where I also started a Visual Narrative Art Program, and we were interviewing new faculty along the way, which was the wedge to force my chillaxed binary against while on the trip and even the days I was at Monument Valley!). Wonderfully, the Navajo Nation owns this territory, and I had arranged a photographic journey for my second day there with an Indigenous guide Harry, who took me around for four hours before daybreak the next morning (my first goal was to photograph “John Ford’s Point” at sunrise, but alas, a woman who owns her house near here forbids tourists coming before 9 am!), and he did an amazing job bringing me to fantastic locations (he also was a great photographer, much better than me, and lent me his tripods and more). But the night before this proved to be better for getting the ultimate sublime views that I was looking for—from the general balcony of the View Hotel.
I had ordered terrific Mexican food from the woman who actually lives at John Ford Point, but wasn’t there for the delivery at the front desk as I was out on the balcony at the back of the hotel—there was a rainstorm, so luckily no one wanted my spot (but I did let those in who occasionally did!) and I stationed myself before, during, and after the rainstorm, taking hundreds of pictures, as the light kept changing as the sunset was approaching and the storm was moving through. Just as I thought all was over (and my good cameras were in the foyer keeping dry near their Trading Post gift store), a certain light came across the landscape, and for an instant, the monuments in the valley turned this incredible orange, and a rainbow appeared out of the sky, and I yelped with excitement, feeling the moment through my whole body, as I took as many images I could in this precious moment with my iPhone.
I chose the best of these for this image, the last painting for the City of Angels show in this exhibition. Rather than listen to the Dead (which I’m always inclined to do!), I sometimes listen to the Rolling Stone magazine “Top 500 albums” (the 2023 version!) as I hope to be one of the “top artists” of my time and listening to the classics (and some of the new great entries!) helps to inspire me—and also bring me back to my own history of memories while I’m painting, and it works a sort of clock to bring me to the absolute best (the current #1 is Marvin Gaye’s incredible What’s Going On) before I finish the work. I love painting the pixels and the “noise” of an image as if its “real”, and loving Cézanne and how, in his Mont Sainte Victoire paintings, he was able to project his unconscious onto the “map” of what his mind was cognizing, subconscious worlds would also project into the image. Here, like looking at clouds and seeing faces, eyes, and other forms would emerge in the landscape, but I try not to illustrate these or bring them out further than what my mind organizes the abstracted elements (especially from a relatively low-res iPhone image) into the work.
We live in such tumultuous times, and perhaps it’s the melatonin I take to sleep, but, especially since the Trump years, I have had intense vivid nightmares and visions, and hope we are progressing towards a better future and not the opposite. While not painting, I was watching some of the great John Ford’s that featured Monument Valley, the quintessential was the first, Stagecoach, that has almost this same panoramic tracking shot, with John Wayne’s stagecoach crossing over what seems to be the exact same road, in black and white, from 1939. Some things, especially in nature, don’t change, and that this is Navajo tribal land, it is considered sacred gratefully it feels much the same. My indigenous guide Harry mentioned that he has seen UFO’s there—he made sure to tell me that they don’t call them “aliens” but “star people”, and the ships were like thin slices of gleaming metal shimmering gliding across the sky like clouds. I didn’t see any here but given the context of wanting to create a panorama of UFO paintings and National Parks in this gallery, to remind us of if we don’t take care of our Earth and the people, flora and fauna on it, perhaps the star people will—and we probably don’t want that to happen! I feel that even conservatives must come to places like this and feel that we need to preserve our National Parks for our grandchildren to enjoy, and along with this, clean air and water, and how this could open the conversation of our interdependence with one another, and taking care of our planet, something I hope sublime paintings like I try to create, can have upon the viewer.
There was a gleam in the rainbow that almost felt like an angel—I’m spiritual, not religious, but wonder about the great beyond, and was thinking of my childhood best friend Dan who recently passed, along with recent family, and my own mortality. The elements towards the center of the rainbow almost felt like people gathering for some cosmic event, and I was finishing this picture, after going through all the “best albums”, I decided to listen to the “best concert” of the Grateful Dead—the fateful Cornell 1977, and right before the art movers were driving up, I was working on the rainbow when my favorite song by them, “Estimated Prophet” came on (this show was originally to be titled this!), that has the lyrics:
My time coming any day, don’t worry ’bout me, no
Been so long I felt this way, but I’m in no hurry, no
Rainbows and down that highway where ocean breezes blow
My time coming, voices saying they tell me where to go
And
Like an angel standing in a shaft of light
Rising up to paradise, I know I’m gonna shine
And the gleam of light in the rainbow really seemed like an angel, and I felt the painting was complete!
This is (from the Library of Congress that owns and has archived the photo in their collection) Photo by Shell R. Alpert, a United States Coast Guard photographer at the Salem, Mass., air station at 9:35 A.M. on July 16, 1952, through a window screen. The 21-year-old US Coast Guard photographer saw four mysterious lights floating outside his photo lab window, and as he noticed the lights were dimming, went outside to call his colleague, then ran back inside to grab his camera, which he had been cleaning and shot this now famous image from the photo lab window. It is an official US Coast Guard photo, #5554.
Alpert described the sighting by stating, “I was sitting in the photo office filing negatives with my back toward the window when I turned slightly in the direction of the window and noticed something bright outside. I observed the sky and saw what appeared to be several bright, almost brilliant lights slightly on the starboard side of the power plant smokestacks. “
The photo made it in many newspapers and went all the way from the Coast Guard to the Pentagon and was in the briefcase of General John A Samford’s 1952 flying saucer press conference, where he tried to debunk the phenomena as it was causing so much stir, just a couple of weeks later. Project Blue Book the official government organization set to task with finding out more this in their investigating UFO sightings (and also to debunk them, according to many and Dr. J Allen Hynek, the leader of the project and then whistle blower and respected UFO advocate), in their investigation of this sighting, tried to claim it was reflections in the window of interior lights—but there were no lights—and also setting up strings of lights above cars in the parking lot seen in the image just to see if it was a set up prank to no avail (interesting to read the declassified Blue Book documents here). This remains one of the best, and most famous of all UFO photos and helped to create the wave and popularity of UFOs in the world.
I feel as in age post Gerhard Richter, my job working from photos is to try to penetrate the photo, rather than just acknowledge the surface (or flatness, in case of Warhol), much like in the beginnings when photography was used as a source, such as in the days of Bonnard and Vuillard. Former Whitney Museum Director said to me I was a “history painter” (my 9-11 painting, of course with much more gravitas but not dissimilar to the composition of this image is part of their collection and was featured in their inaugural downtown show), and I think the job of a history painting is to make alive the feeling and world of the event that has transpired, to give people the warmth and emotion of what it must have been like to witness the event, in addition making them care and critically think about that moment in time what happened. For this, I found on Google Earth the exact location off the coast of Maine of the (now old and abandoned) station, to get a feeling of the color of the atmosphere and time, in addition to researching the colors of cars in that era, and more.
While painting, I listened to J. Allen Hynek’s historic book The UFO Experience: Evidence Behind Close Encounters, Project Blue Book, and the Search for Answers in addition to music that conjured for me the feelings and emotions of wonder for the scene, notably Brian Eno’s Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks (his soundtrack for the Apollo mission documentary For All Mankind), in addition to other Eno later ambient works, Phillip Glass symphonies and his soundtracks for Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi and his operas, especially Einstein on the Beach and Akhnaten (which I love now as much as when I was a kid). The minimalist aesthetic to this music seemed on point, as I found the essential compositional track for this was the lines of the screen, apparent in the high res image I obtained from online, where I could see this in the foreground (along with the pull from window blinds and the silhouette of the window!) looking through at the phenomena that was occurring outside, like Dorthy looking through the window of her home at the flying witch during that sequence in the Wizard of Oz. I tried to look at the details of the glowing lights as much as I could as I painted them, with cremnitz white at the end (that has lead in it and makes it have a tactile, piled up texture), thinking too of one of my favorite Fra Angelico paintings, that of Christ, in front of what looks almost like a UFO in his visionary triptych painting of the Last Judgement ca. 1435-40 at the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin (a painting that I’ve studied and drawn in person!).
_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg){kind=link}
The agnostic thing to say about UFO’s is that they exist, we just don’t know literally what they are or where they came from. They notoriously have been seen since WWII around military bases and have been known to shut off nuclear warhead operations and seem distinctly involved and interested in our military weapons of mass destruction and operations. Then and now the military stresses that they don’t seem like a threat to mankind, but with the power they have, who knows? The exciting time of our moment, is that finally, nearly 80 years since the first contemporary sightings (and they have been talked about, written about, and painted since biblical times!), the government has finally acknowledged their existence—and projects that we don’t know what they are or where they come from or what to do about them (although there are hundreds of conspiracy theories about all this). We are finding out more during official congressional hearings, and from other nations that have acknowledged their existence for decades, and there is hope for “full disclosure” in our near future. For now, we can only wonder and contemplate—and this is one of the images that helped the visionary world and wonder about UFO’s (or UAP’s as they are now called—Unidentified Aerial Phenomena to avoid the baggage of the results of the demonization of UFO’s and their fringe believers of the bast) and why they are here….
This is from one of the most famous now images of UFO’s—called UAPs (Unidentified Ariel Phenomena, to overcome the baggage of the UFO stigmatization), originally printed on the front page of the New York Times in their 2017 historic article from Dec. 16, 2017 “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O Program” that was the first major news item to reveal their acknowledgement and involvement with the phenomena. The image is from a still I selected-for it’s compositional torque as the aircraft began to spin– from the Official U.S. Navy video of a 2015 UFO encounter, taken aboard a Navy fighter jet from the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, off the eastern seaboard, near the Florida coast. On the video, you can hear the voice of the Navy pilot talk with his cohort, in another plane, viewing the same phenomena, saying there is a” whole fleet of them” that they “are all going against the wind, the wind is 120 notes to the West” and expressing their aghast at how they are moving, “rotating,” and more.
Pilots from the same carrier strike group operating off the United States East Coast also were able to film the GOFAST video also in the Times reporting (a third video, FLIR, of a “Tic Tac” shaped flying object was also part of the triad of images, from 2004 of the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group off the Coast of Southern California. These were advanced infrared imagery, showing the cockpit display data (the information I rendered on the sides of the image are accurate—except for my signature—I also love Jasper Johns stenciled text in his works!), initially brought to the press from the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Christopher Mellon. As part of the article, one of the writers of the story, Leslie Klein interviews Luis Elizondo, the resigned director of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, who has also become part of the team of post US government officials who are hoping for full disclosure—he had resigned in 2017 from the Pentagon as he felt the program wasn’t being taken seriously. Since that time, in 2019, a Pentagon spokeswoman Susan Gough publicly confirmed that the videos were made by naval aviators and are “part of a larger issue of an increased number of training range incursions by unidentified aerial phenomena in recent years”. In 2022 the Pentagon officially released the videos, and since then, and more so in recent times, there have been Congressional hearings, with senators from both sides of the aisle demanding transparency and intelligence briefings to get to the bottom of the issue and our governments involvement to bring to the public the disclosure of what has been rumored to be happening since the Cold War, and perhaps, for much longer than this.
The agnostic approach is to say not that little grey men are piloting flying saucers from other planets, but that truly these are unidentified objects—that could be anything from anywhere, we just don’t know what they are, but they do seem to be performing with technology unknown to us. But the exciting thing of our moment in time is that we know that the Earth isn’t flat, nor is it the center of the universe, and that it is now acknowledged FACT that UFO’s—or UAP’s are REAL. More evidence is being released at an increased rate since this time, and officials have been revealing—and to Congress (the most recent hearing was in 2023 with the Congressional Committee on Oversight and Accountability with David Fravor, the USS NIMmitz FLIR pilot giving testimony under earth, along with fighter pilot Ryan Graves and former intelligence officer, retired Maj. David Grusch—who in his jaw-dropping testimony that in his research, conducted under Congressional edicts, we have ships—and bodies—of UFO pilots, and that in his opinion “the technology that we faced was far superior than anything that we had”).
I am a child of the Pictures Generation, just turned 58, and was in college and grad school in the 80’s and early 90’s when artists began appropriating imagery, building on the Duchampian maneuvers of Warhol and the rest to bring “ready-mades” of popular imagery, including newspaper photos, into fine art painting, putting imagery in greater context that recoded the images and bringing them into critical context of their oeuvre. Gerhard Richter is a giant for this, and I love and respect his work, the from the early appropriation imagery from the Germans Capital Realism works, building on Warhol (and Rosenquist’s F-111 series), his series of the Baader-Meinhof group, and even his cloud paintings. But I feel the job of my generation and now, “post Richter” is, if he was about painting the surface of the image, to penetrate the image for warmth and painterly otherworldliness. I learned, especially from painting from “historical photographs” like the James Dean Crash Site (a 2004 painting that is a promised gift to LACMA) that there is a certain “energy” to these images, ones that sometimes have been seen and pondered by millions. “Spirit” photography is cool—back in the 1850s, with the advent of photography was the beginnings of the Spiritualist movement, and trying to capture ghosts, ectoplasm, and more in photography (much of it faked) was an intriguing trend of the times.
When I am painting from photos, I listen to music and audiobooks that help to channel my energy in the right direction as I’m “channeling” from the photos everything I can conjure from the visual information before me. The photos act as talismans, Proustian madeleines for me to ruminate from, and I find myself thinking about dreams, memories, and everything that I can gleam from both my unconscious and unconscious mind while painting. A son of a psychoanalyst, even my post Freudian father would say we don’t know everything about dreams and unconscious, and I love the paintings of Cézanne, where he uses the forms of the landscapes before his to project his unconscious, like a map into his inner world, of his own dreams and visions. I have a surrealist take on the Impressionists, Post Impressionists, and Modernists—once it became okay, partly due to Cézanne and the rise of photography, to be able to make paintings that didn’t resemble photos or subjective reality, the inner mind could project itself into the picture plane along with the conscious reality of phenomena and expression they were striving to achieve. Leonardo said that artists sometimes always paint themselves—I think he meant that a poor artist would paint more the resemblance of themselves than whom they are trying to portray—but I also think the inner mind of resemblance of the artist sometimes spills into a picture when painting. With Cézanne, I see “Cézanne holes” in the middle of his paintings, where his face might have been situated, that look like a reverse mask, where you can make out eyes, teeth, beard, and more. In Van Gogh, you can see his face and beard in the forms of his cypress trees, in Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon you can see his hidden self-portrait—maybe even to himself—in the negative space to the right of the third female figure in the painting, in El Greco, whom he studied, faces and forms and eyes appear in the negative space, the folds and broken forms of his expressive paintings. I think when we try to cognize intricate visual information that our “left brain” can’t make sense of, we start to see—as human being animals as perhaps a defense mechanism to identify faces—eyes, faces, forms. When Pollock was making his drip paintings, he would create faces, eyes, psycho-sexual imagery in his “automatic drawing” that he would reveal in his later work that he would layer over and over so you can’t see in the earlier works (that keeps your mind’s eye fluctuating when your own inner mind tries to make sense of the squiggles and forms). In college, one of my favorite paintings at MOMA was the Tribulations of Saint Anthony by James Ensor (1887) which was so much fun to gaze into and see all the forms and figures he saw emerging—but I don’t want to illustrate them as he has done, but let them “be” in their own world.
When looking at the “noise” of photos, especially those as complex in this infrared, “reversed” photo taken from a video from a plane, I was cognizing all types of forms and eyes, etc., especially given the sci-fi nature of the source material. While painting, I listened to Beethoven, Bach, and Mozart symphonies and operas, trying to get to the “big picture” of the Kantian sublime, as, especially in this image, the UAP and the atmosphere around it (and the global atmosphere and revelation about UAPs was phenomenal about the phenomena) created for our culture the epiphany, finally, of the government admitting to their existence—and by (perhaps non-agnostic approach) that we are most likely “not alone”. I’m like the character Jodie Foster plays in the film Contact, who says (paraphrasing) that the universe is so vast, there must be other beings in the world:
“I was given something wonderful, a vision of the universe, that tells us undeniably how tiny and insignificant and how rare and precious we all are. A vision that tells us that we belong to something that is greater than ourselves, that we are to—that none of us are alone… If everyone, if even for one moment, could feel that awe and humility and that hope… That continues to be my wish…”
This is the idea of the sublime, feeling a much smaller part of a larger thing, and if we can objectify ourselves in a good way, that we understand if we are just one of many, that the interconnectedness of people and things demands that we take care of ourselves, our flora and fauna to save our planet, hopefully the UAP’s won’t do this for us. I don’t know if art can do this—and Kant said a human can’t create the same awe in their work as the mighty ocean–but we can try!
I love Turner’s paintings of the sublime, and in particular with this painting, I was thinking in the end of his great “The Fighting Temeraire”, the famous picture at the National Gallery of the veteran warship being taken in by the tugboat to be scrapped, the larger symbiology of the age of sail giving way to the age of steam, and the mightiness of Britain’s past perhaps coming to an eclipse. Turner would use technology and science to inform and give gravitas both to the compositions and subject matter of his works and feel he would be excited about our new science and abilities to see into space—and whatever the new technology of a UAP could represent. The color and composition of this masterwork seemed perfect to use as a key to this painting.
On a deeply personal note, it was uncanny to me that in the last day of painting this picture, I had vivid thoughts and images in my mind of my cousin Andrew, who had mental health issues—he was schizophrenic and living in a (very good!) home near Denver, where my cousin and godmother Debra would visit him all the time, and he was a dear friend of the family. It turned out he had passed away tragically from health issues that day that I was painting, and somehow feel that I must have been having my experience do to this. I’m not religious, but I am spiritual, and tried lastly to help him reach a great beyond by going back into the picture, thinking about him, and helping to guide him heavenward to a peaceful rest into eternity.
When planning on this show, as a narrative artist coming from comics thinking about juxtapositions, and how the paintings “talk with one another” like a non-linear montage sequence in a movie, I was thinking of how, like in the Sego Canyon National Park in Utah the “UFO” and “alien” like petroglyphs are juxtaposed to the beauty of the Canyon, how if we don’t take care of our planet, and the people, flora, and fauna upon it, perhaps “they” will (and we probably don’t want that to happen!).
Although my husband and I live in Riverside, near Lake Elsinore, only a couple of hours away from Joshua Tree, we had never visited (kind of how we were in Manhattan for 25 years and never went to the Statue of Liberty!). I knew I wanted it for this show, as I have already painted Yosemite and other national parks, and given the sci-fi uncanniness of the show, wanted a landscape that felt otherworldly, and central to the Southern California experience. I had read also that during Covid, when it was less populated and looked after, that horrible people had gone into the park and stole and damaged these ancient and legendary “trees” (giant Yucca plants, but that can live and grow for hundreds of years).
My family was visiting for Christmas in 2023, and I thought it would be a great trip for my then 90-year-old father and I to take when he stayed over with Andrew and I to get a feel for where we live. Early one day we went off in my Porsche Spyder to the park, which was a fun, if not long (even longer with intense traffic coming back) drive. Once there, my dad and I took some short walks around the hills of the area (I grew up in Colorado hiking and skiing with my family, and my father is in terrific physical shape), taking photos and ruminating about life. On the drive through the park, almost towards the end, I saw this fallen tree and immediately pulled over to take the photo this painting was based on. The fallen Joshua Tree seemed pertinent, melancholic and almost operatic in its sadness, given the history of these great plants, but with new growth surrounding it, and young Joshua Trees in the background growing—the circle of life.
My father is suffering, despite his great physical health, with cognitive decline, a constant source of terrific frustration, especially as he is exceptionally bright and a retired psychiatrist and understands only too well what is happening to him. While this is a portrait of nature in decline, symbolic of global warming and our disparaging treatment of our beautiful Earth, it also is a personal picture, thinking of our family, time, mortality and immortality of our spirit, with generations giving to other generations (although my sister and I are both gay and childless, it may be the end of the Mayerson line with us?!).
The new Beyoncé album Cowboy Carter had just come out when I was embarking upon this work. I’m a huge Beyoncé fan (as well as Van Gogh!), and I couldn’t help but listen to the album on constant repeat while painting this. I love Western Art and would visit the Denver Museum’s amazing collection often—when I was young ignorant of its strengths, but now as an adult, visiting with my folks when I visit, I love looking at these amazing (although politically complicated!) images, and think the landscapes of Bierstadt, Moran, and more never get old, and reach something deep within me. Riverside also was the teenage home of Jackson Pollock, and at the Mission Inn, where Andrew and I used to for three years, Pollock would visit with his brother Charles and be inspired by their painting collection to become the AbEx artist he became—perhaps the “wildness” of this movement had its roots partly in Western Art (he also was a student of regionalist Thomas Hart Benton!). In any event, I do hold Western Art at a critical distance, although realize it’s part of my core, kind of like how Beyoncé might feel about country music growing up in Houston—but being Beyoncé! The spirit of the record, uplifting and recoding genres, and the straight white male patriarchal take on what is normally considered now tragically of Trump country seems redemptive and optimistic. I’m hoping that spirit is also part of the picture, acknowledging loss, but also optimistically hopeful about the “circle of life” and the future!
Rocky Mountain National Park is located a little over an hour Northwest of downtown Denver, where my parents live (and the suburbs of which I grew up in as a child). When I was little, we used to go on summer vacation to the YMCA camp at Estes Park, just ten minutes away from the park, and my parents and I went back there to visit a few years ago to reminisce, have a day trip in the mountains and to see its growth. On the way back, we couldn’t help but stop by this one scenic outlook at the park, and taking my camera, I took this picture, as my father and I walked to the edge of this overlook.
We used to go up to the mountains to ski my whole childhood—my family had a condo at Copper Mountain, in Summit County, where I spent some of the fondest times with them and my friends, skiing in the winter, hiking in the summer, and spending the weekends in the sublime wilderness that I was too young to consciously appreciate the depths of, but this landscape is a part of my core being and I now embrace it wholeheartedly.
In this part of the City of Angels exhibition, I’m thinking of the National Parks meets UFO panorama of paintings to be allegorical—if we don’t take care of our Earth, perhaps the UFO’s will for us—something we probably don’t want to happen! My camera is a mirrorless Sony A7 camera, that my childhood best friend Dan Knapp recognized my wide angle lens wasn’t set to take full advantage of—he retrofitted the lens—which wasn’t made to accommodate the full frame of the camera, to have this iris-like affect, which I love as it both reminds me of him (he passed away tragically from a car accident a few years ago), and it reminds me of the “iris shot” that in silent movies to emphasize a detail of a scene, but also more commonly to open or end a sequence in a movie. I like this affect for this painting—I’m hoping that we aren’t at the close of a chapter of the beauty of nature and our planet with global warming and more—but it so feels like this as our planet is warming and people become more war mongering—I hope this is just a scene that will be transitioning into a better future. But also, my parents aren’t getting younger, and as I age, I feel for their—and my own—mortality.
I love the American Transcendentalist spirit, along with the Western Art of the Denver Art Museum I grew up visiting, and the Hudson River School and painters such as Thomas Moran and Bierstadt, who are represented well in the museum, part of the core of my aesthetic being, as being part of this region and nature. People like John Muir felt as everything was alive in nature, even in the rocks beyond the plants, and being in the wealth of richness of the natural world, it sometimes feels like this. Painters in this time didn’t have the advantage of high-resolution digital color photography obviously, but if they did, I think they would also use photos to capture all the detail with as much exactitude as possible. I also love Cézanne, and in his landscapes, especially his Mont Sainte Victoire paintings, would allow his subconscious to spill out onto the map of what he was consciously observing, something I am trying to do, ruminating about my youth and using the image as a talisman, as he might think of himself and his childhood friend Zola hiking through the mountains he painted. Our inner mind has an ability to see “faces in clouds” as they cognize the information we see, especially in complicated details in nature, and I’m doing this here, allowing for those forms to come out, but not to illustrate them. I thought there was a figure, much like an old “father time” like man hiking through the clouds (thinking about my father), but in the negative space of the clouds just to our left of this figure is a skier, like a slalom racer almost perfectly depicted, that I had no idea I was painting until after it was finished, that also must have been my inner mind thinking of my youth.
I like to paint the pixels and lens flares as if they are “real”, and loving the sublime suns of Turner, enjoyed trying to bring out the spirit of the work with the intensity of the rays of the sun as they appeared in the picture, but also the inner worlds of the lens flare circles of light, almost like Wizard of Oz good witch bubbles (or given the sci-fi like allegory of the context of this painting—like UFO’s!) emanating into the atmosphere.
The paths and roads seem to go into the distance and jump off into eternity—thinking about the mortality of life and our journeys, but also thinking about the sublimity of nature’s existence and how we are all part of a much larger world and cosmology, hope this painting recognizes where we are in our global warming planet earth, but also the wealth of our lives still able to hopefully build a planet with a better future for those who will enjoy, into eternity.
Leslie Kean, who is a leading UFO expert in the United States (and who helped to break the famous disclosure article in the New York Times in the 2017 historic article from Dec. 16, 2017 “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O Program” that was the first major news item to reveal their acknowledgement and involvement with the phenomena) believes this is the “best photograph of a UFO ever taken”. It was taken in 1971 by a surveyor and aerial photographer Sergio Loaiza, flying 10,000 feet over Lake Cote in Costa Rica in his job to survey the land on behalf of the National Geographic Costa Rica to study the potential impact of the construction of a hydroelectric project, which was being planned near the Arenal Volcano near the lake. For his survey, he took many high-res black and white photos of the lake and surrounding rain forest from an altitude of 3,000 meters at 20-second intervals with his automated 100lb camera situated on the bottom of his Aero Commander F680 aircraft. He was surprised noticing, that at about 8:25 in the morning, in just one of the photos, on the left side of one of the frames, a shiny metallic disc appears (and nowhere else in any of his images. National Geographic and him realized the anomaly, and he thought this couldn’t be a technical glitch, but National Geographic owned the image, and made him suppress any news about it, although the word got out, and the nephew of a man working with a UFO research group UAP Media obtained a contact copy of the original negative in the National Archives of Costa Rica was able to have it recently rescanned, where the image is made even more clear, estimated to be between 120-220 feet in diameter.
UAP Media says on its website:
“Over the years the image has been analyzed by various experts such as Costa Rican UFO researcher Ricardo Vílchez, Dr Richard Haines and Dr Jacques Vallée. They all concluded that the object in the photograph appeared real and was NOT the result of double exposure or a deliberate fabrication”.
As the original image is black and white, I found on Google Earth the exact location of where it appeared, and used this for color reference, in addition to getting the details of the movement of water in the lake. The only thing I “invented” was the shadow of the disc in the water, which I thought was good to balance the image and compositionally to suggest its movement towards—or away from—the land mass. Also, although the original negative appears in this orientation, it is flipped from how it appears in the natural landscape, but enjoyed this effect as it reminded me of the Pacific coastline of the ocean to California, to making it more relatable to this “chapter” of My American Dream. I also enjoyed painting the edge of the negative, to indicate that this is a fragment from a whole negative photo image—and the saucer was so close to the edge as to almost be cut off (and like a strange figurative silhouette profile looking onto the scene.).
I love the anthropomorphized landscapes of the early Renaissance artists all the way to Thomas Cole, who sometimes transformed the mountains of his landscapes into faces and figurative forms. I’m also a big fan of Van Gogh, Cézanne, and the modernist painters who were able to transmute what they saw in nature alongside their unconscious thoughts and gestures, making an inner world as palatable and “real” in the plastic space of the picture plane as oil paint can make anything representational. DaVinci said that a painter paints themselves, I believe that he meant sometimes when an artist creates a portrait it looks more like the artist than the person they are trying to portray, but I also think our inner mind’s eye of our visage spills through the brush when we are deep in the meditation of painting, focusing on areas and trying to make sense of the detail (especially all the complicated micromanaging in details from nature!). If you look at the center of Cézanne’s, there is what I call a “Cézanne hole” where his face must have been in the center of his work as he is painting—and like a reverse mask of his face appears-eyes, beard, teeth—in the landscape. Look at Van Gogh’s cypress trees and landscapes, and sometimes you see his face, eyes, nose, beard intact unconsciously projected into the trees! Here, as I was looking at the black and white high-res scan, and translating into color, I would see eyes and more in the forms (also thinking about the sci-fi allegory of the work in general) and wanted to bring this out without illustrating them). In this section of the exhibition, the idea is that there is a “panorama” of paintings of both UFO sightings and National Parks, with the allegory in mind of “if we don’t take care of our planet—and flora and fauna upon it—perhaps the UFO’s will—and we probably don’t want this to happen!”. Having the landscape anthropomorphized for me promotes the idea of (sorry for the gender code!) “Mother Earth” or at least, in the American Transcendentalist spirit I’m influenced by, how everything in nature is alive, and perhaps they are happy that the UFO is watching out for nature and our Earth!
Adam Weinberg, former Director of the Whitney Museum, says I’m a history painter, which I like. I’m proud that I have three paintings (and four drawings!) in the collection, including my 9-11 painting that was featured in their inaugural show. For that work, very bittersweetly, it depicts the second plane about to hit the second tower, on a day that I personally witnessed (with my students in Washington Park!). Although it was with a heavy heart I was honored to have the work installed, and the edifying thing was to see people pointing at the painting, talking about their stories, telling their children, and being moved by the work. This painting, while wholly different, is compositionally similar, with a flying ship heading towards land, but also, as a “history painting”—after all, this is the “best photo of a UFO ever taken” and now we know—as the government and Pentagon admits—UFO’s are “real”—this image might have a place in history. I feel that with history painting, our job is to bring warmth, light, and color into the work, as if you are recreating the scene for people to not only contemplate, but also to feel synesthetically what it must have been like to be at the scene of that event and time. Hopefully there is something also gently ironic about creating a painting—slowing down time—of an instantaneous moment that it must have been for the plane to take this picture before the UFO slipped away. I have taught comics for my entire career teaching fine art and exhibiting, and I love integrating comics motif’s into works—here, very subtle “action lines” are to the left of the UFO to help indicate movement, and I also, especially with the waves in the water, wanted the brush lines of my paint to emulate the movement of the water brushing towards the shore, the clouds waving in their approval of the UFO, and so on. I hope this helps to reinvigorate this old black and white image, albeit having a second life online as a high-res scan now that UFO’s—or UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, a new government term to get over the negative stereotypes the government created for UFO’s and their “believers”) are now considered legitimate! Google “UFO congress” to see amazing recent testimonials to our Congress about this phenomenon—and with senators from across the aisle becoming believers based on the overwhelming evidence and authority of those presenting. This is an exciting moment in history–the agnostic approach is to say we don’t know where they are from, or what they are—literally they are unidentified, but the Earth isn’t flat, nor is it the center of our universe, and UFOs are real.
This is from a now famous image taken by the James Webb Telescope, from 2022, and one of the first to be presented to the public—when President Joe Biden was proudly honoring NASA’s great accomplishment of putting the best telescope into space (that was preceded by the Hubble), this is one of the images that was behind him and became like a poster child for the project. I hope to be like a history painter, but also love the work of Turner, the Romantics, the Hudson River School, and painters striving for the Kantian sublime in their works. I feel if Turner had access to high-res images of space, he would probably turn there after his amazing maritime works and wanted to record this moment in history. The sublime in images make us feel so small in the overwhelming grandness of the cosmos, that we objectify ourselves and our world to realize the interconnectedness of all beings. I hope in striving to create such works, we can then recognize the need to help one another, have compassion and empathy for all the flora and fauna on the planet, to survive as a species, in peace and harmony with nature, for our future and for the health of our planet.
From the NASA website page celebrating and presenting the image this painting is based on:
“This landscape of “mountains” and “valleys” speckled with glittering stars is the edge of a nearby, young, star-forming region called NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula. Captured in infrared light by NASA’s new James Webb Space Telescope, this image reveals for the first time previously invisible areas of star birth.
Called the Cosmic Cliffs, Webb’s seemingly three-dimensional picture looks like craggy mountains on a moonlit evening. It is the edge of the giant, gaseous cavity within NGC 3324, and the tallest “peaks” in this image are about 7 light-years high. The cavernous area has been carved from the nebula by the intense ultraviolet radiation and stellar winds from extremely massive, hot, young stars located in the center of the bubble, above the area shown in this image.
The blistering, ultraviolet radiation from the young stars is sculpting the nebula’s wall by slowly eroding it away. Dramatic pillars tower above the glowing wall of gas, resisting this radiation. The “steam” that appears to rise from the celestial “mountains” is hot, ionized gas and hot dust streaming away from the nebula due to the relentless radiation.
Webb reveals emerging stellar nurseries and individual stars that are completely hidden in visible-light pictures. Because of Webb’s sensitivity to infrared light, it can peer through cosmic dust to see these objects. Protostellar jets, which emerge clearly in this image, shoot out from some of these young stars. The youngest sources appear as red dots in the dark, dusty region of the cloud. Objects in the earliest, rapid phases of star formation are difficult to capture, but Webb’s extreme sensitivity, spatial resolution, and imaging capability can chronicle these elusive events.”
This was an almost impossible picture to paint—like the previous image of the Cosmic Cliffs by the Hubble, there is almost no way a human with a brush could hope to paint the nuance and the detail of this magnificent new telescopes ability to see so clearly—but I could try! For me, how it’s not like a photo is what is “me” about the image, and I feel our job, post Gerhard Richter, is to penetrate into the picture plane with warmth and emotion, to make the space and spirit of the image feel “alive” again, much like when the beginnings of photography allowed painters such as Bonnard and Vuillard the ability to make “all over” paintings by capturing the detail in all the area of an image with more exactitude than en plein air, but with the painterly feeling, and emotion of the artist projecting their own meditation upon the forms that they see. I’m a big fan too of the anthropomorphized landscape of the early Renaissance all the way to Thomas Cole, who sometimes would have faces and figures in his mountains, and of the way the post impressionists, and the modernists would sometimes project their inner minds and self-portraits to embed unwittingly into the cypress trees of Van Gogh or the Mont Sainte-Victoire’s of Cézanne. Here, with the incredible sublime of these overwhelming Cosmic Cliffs, I could only hope to engage in the mythos of what is being formed.
While painting, I listened to the audiobook of the great Frank Herbert’s Dune. My husband and I are huge Dune fans, the books and the films (albeit being our generation we love the David Lynch movie way more than the Timothée Chalamet, but of course these are excellent, too!), and the interplanetary scale of the work—and its ecological and political messages woven throughout its cosmology seems pertinent to our times, and the time for which I was painted this work! I could travel from star to star as the characters were jumping from planets, thinking about the perils of our tumultuous times when trying to remind myself about the smallness of our world within these cosmos (our solar system would be a tiny dot!). I also use as a kind of “clock” the (2023 version!) of the Rolling Stone magazine “Top 500 albums” and listened to my favorite selection of these (which were many) as I was painting, “counting down” to Number #1 (Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On!) kind of like the 1977 Voyager Space Missions, that sent a gold plated record of Chuck Berry (Johnny B. Goode—on Chuck Berry’s greatest hits collection “The Great 28”, currently #51 on the Rolling Stone list!) along with Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and the sound of a mother kissing her child and more into space for extraterrestrial life far away to stumble upon and learn about our species. So many memories are embedded, like Proustian madeleines through the talismans of this music and my life that gave me much to ruminate upon as I was suturing into my own astro ship painting this image.
I’m like Jodie Foster in the 1997 movie Contact, who says in the end of the film “I’ll tell you one thing about the universe, though. The universe is a pretty big place. It’s bigger than anything anyone has ever dreamed of before. So, if it’s just us… seems like an awful waste of space. Right?” There is no question that in the vastness of space and galaxies there must be intelligent life out there, far beyond what we can comprehend. In the context of this exhibition, with the panorama of UFO paintings, based on photographs that have yet to be debunked, and the National Parks (which I feel even conservatives must love and want for their grandchildren to enjoy, which can open up the conversation for clean air and water, reversing global warming and taking care of each other and our planet), if UFOs (or UAPs as the government now calls them to get over the stigmatization they caused by falsely debunking UFOs and their believers) are “real” as our Pentagon now admits, have they come from the great beyond? And if so, why are they here—to save us, or to save our planet from us? In the great cosmos, if we are just a tiny spec, the interrelatedness of all beings on our planet and taking care of our own mother ship is imperative, but also we are part of the great galactic federation of cosmos, and we better do our part to care for each other and our earth to keep up our responsibility. Made up of stardust, we must be true to the stars that bore us into life.
The Battle of Los Angeles is based on a famous photograph, reproduced on the front page of the Los Angeles Times the day after the incident on February 25,1942 of an infamous occurrence, just two months after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, that many people thought this was some sort of Japanese attack. There was a flying object that was tracked on radar, and that was then seen visually. The US military then fired 1,430 rounds of artillery with many ground and military witnesses—some who claimed there were more than one of these flying objects—but all the army’s anti-aircraft barrage were unable to bring any down. There weren’t any Japanese planes in the air or aircraft carriers in the area, and the objects that were being fired at mysteriously just disappeared.
This happened before the whole UFO phenomena took hold, and “hundreds of thousands of people saw” the phenomena, took pictures of it, before the fourteen hundred rounds were fired into the sky and it went unscathed. Thirteen hours before this, a lone Japanese submarine had fired 13 rounds at an oil refinery in Santa Barbara causing only $500 in damage, and California was on high alert, and the radar signals and strange lights in the sky caused mass hysteria, but the tepid explanation of weather balloons or Japanese planes, none of which were ever found, explains away the incident, which is why many think this may be one of the first sightings of “real UFO’s”.
Days later after all the news had spread the Roosevelt administration declared it a false alarm, despite the witnesses and the obvious fact this was a real thing, and the object was oblivious to the firing. However, decades later, it was found that Army Chief of Staff had written to President Roosevelt days later after the would-be attack:
“This headquarters has come to the determination that the mystery airplanes are in fact not earthly and according to secret intelligence sources they are in all probability of interplanetary origin”.
Although disputed, there are more documents that have come to light that there were multiple events over LA and San Bernadino where objects were retrieved that were not from our civilization. The Roosevelt administration chose to cover up these events to avoid hysteria, but many believe this is where the coverup about UFOs all began.
In the photo in the LA Times, it had been touched up from the original, which is now also online (but alas, no high-res versions!), but only to brighten up the image (that was underdeveloped) with a few more spotlights, and felt it was this image that I should use as it’s such a famous image that inspired so much history. I like to paint the “noise” of the image as if it’s “real” and ruminate (and channel) the energy and imagery, as I listen to audiobooks and music playlists that help to inform me about the image which acts as a talisman to my imagination as I build from the photo into a painterly painting of warmth and emotion. Part of the power of cartoons is that they are essentialized images that are simplified from reality that mimic how we dream and think of imagery—if we could project our dreams on a screen, perhaps a smiley-face like ghost would be like “grandpa”, and so on. When we are looking at detailed images, that are hard to cognize, I feel that we see and organize information in our mind’s eye with literal eyes and faces—like seeing “faces in clouds”. With the noise of the original image of Battle of Los Angeles, there was so much energy and intensity, that was also very abstract in so many ways, that as I at micromanaged the detail, I would see strange “eyes” and faces, almost like the entities that could be creating the phenomena were watching telepathically in the sky. Also thinking about where we are today in our endangered planet, and fear of the politics that are leading us into wars across the planet—much like the times of WWII.