My American Dream

Sitting Bull (1931-90) was a Hunkpapa Lakota holy man and tribal chief during the years of resistance to US government policies, famous also for helping his people defeat Custer and his cavalry during the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876, as he saw of vision of Custer and his soldiers dying before the battle, giving his people the motivation for one of their greatest victories (and unfortunately the motivation for the government to retaliate in full, leading to the defeat at Standing Rock and eventually Sitting Bull’s death).  Unlike many of the Native American leaders in his time, Sitting Bull refused to compromise his people’s land and agency in the bogus treaties and agreements that the US government tried to have tribes sign to compromise their land for western expansion and manifest destiny.   Although born in Dakota territory, Sitting Bull’s people weren’t involved in the Dakota War of 1862, where several bands of eastern Dakota people killed an estimated 300 to 800 settlers and soldiers in south-central Minnesota in response to poor treatment by the government. But in 1863/64 while they were still fighting the Civil War, the United States army retaliated against bands that had not been involved anyway, involving Sitting Bull, who, along with many others, defended his people. In a time of many tribes with different idiosyncratic tendencies and rivalries, Sitting Bull was elected to lead, some say as the “Supreme Chief of the whole Sioux Nation”, however this has also been refuted as the Lakota society was highly decentralized, still, Sitting Bull was seen by many as a great leader.  In the Great Sioux War of 1876, leading to the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull’s band of Hunkpapa continued to battle migrating parties following Custer’s instigation of the Black Hills Gold Rush (Custer had announced that there was gold in government-issued Sioux sacred territory, encouraging and motivating expansion there), successfully compromising the movement.  During the period of 1868-76, Sitting Bull developed into the most important of Native American chiefs, refusing to become dependent on government support and having his people living on government enforced reservations, and was joined by many others who didn’t want to fall under subjugation. Sitting Bull welcomed all tribes and people to join with him peacefully, nourishing them and providing support, and his camp continually expanded into a community of over 10,000 people.  When Custer’s 7th Cavalry attacked the Cheyenne and Lakota tribes at their camp on the Little Big Horn River (known as the Greasy Grass River to the Lakota) on June 25, 1876, they didn’t realize how large the camp was.  More than 2,000 Native American warriors had left their reservations to follow Sitting Bull, and being inspired by his vision where he saw the soldiers being killed upon entering the camp, they fought back, lead by Crazy Horse, and annihilated them.

Sitting Bull and his peoples victory didn’t last long, as Custer was a national hero, and the news of his death inspired the government to bring thousands of more soldiers to the area, forcing many of the Native Americans to surrender, and ultimately leading Sitting Bull and his people to retreat to Canada.  Although he made friends with Canadian/British leaders there, they couldn’t sustain themselves for lack of food and resources, and after 4 years, starving and exhausted, eventually gave into surrender to the United States in 1881, with Sitting Bull having his young son Crow Foot his rifle to the commanding officer at Fort Buford, and told them that he wished to regard the soldiers and the white race as friends but he wanted to know who would teach his son the new ways of the world.   Prisoners of war, Sitting Bull and his band of now 186 people were kept at different Forts, separated from the rest of the other Hunkpapa.  But in 1885, Sitting Bull was allowed to leave the reservation to participate with Buffalo Bill Cody’s Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.  He had met Annie Oakley, who so impressed him he adopted her as his daughter, and she returned his respect and treasured him as a friend, and he earned $50 a week riding around the area once a show, either cursing the audience under his breath, or by other accounts, giving speeches abut his desire for education for the young, and reconciling relations between the Sioux and Whites.  In just four months, before he was forced to return to Standing Rock Agency by the government, he became, along with Annie, the most popular attraction of the show, where people considered him a romanticized warrior and celebrity, and although Sitting Bull earned quite a bit of money charging for his autograph and pictures, he have his money away to the homeless.  Back at Standing Rock, a new movement called the “Ghost Dance” had been growing, based on the belief that spirits would one day arise and give back the Native peoples their land, and although Sitting Bull himself didn’t believe in this, allowed his people to chant and dance for hours in ritual practice, as he felt it gave them hope.  This created fear amongst the soldiers, however, and they accused Sitting Bull in leading and encouraging the movement, and wanted to forcefully arrest him. Sitting Bull peacefully refused the arrest, but panic ensued as the Sioux in the village were enraged, and ultimately a Sioux police officer ended up shooting Sitting Bull in the head killing him, completing the prophecy Sitting Bull had of being killed by his own people.

I, like so many Americans, grew up knowing of Sitting Bull, but not enough about his life story and plight of Native Americans in detail at this time, as my early education barely scratched this surface of our horrible history of the mass genocide of Native American peoples in the colonization of this country.  It was incredible to learn more about him and paint this picture, listening to the excellent book “The Last Stand: Custer, Sittling Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn” by Nathaniel Philbrick (who I’m proud to say saw this painting and enjoyed it!), in addition to traditional Lakota music and songs, in addition to recordings of Pow-wow’s and other Native American music.  I really wanted to by homage to this great hero, who we don’t see enough of in museums or galleries (or of course, by extension, any Native American presence, beyond Frederic Remington paintings and statues and questionable representation in Hudson River School Paintings (although I have been inspired by the pro (for his time) Native-American works of George Catlin).  Our country recognizes its horrible history of slavery and mistreatment of many peoples of color, Native Americans’ included, but this aspect of American History in the “ethnic cleansing” of Native Americans doesn’t see enough representation in our cultural media.  I truly wanted to pay homage to this great man, and also recognize what he represents in taking one of the great last stands for the rights of his people.  I was really moved in painting this picture—like that of Annie Oakley, he stands in front of a painted backdrop, which seems, like the special effects of films like the Wizard of Oz, to spill out into surreal, unconsciously realized worlds, I thought of all the people that he tried to save, and the sacred lands he tried to keep for his people, and the joy of his life, his compassion, understanding, and leadership, in addition to his bittersweet demise—his memory certainly lives on, in addition to the values he kept to life, the country, and its people, of all races, creeds, colors, and class.

Martin Luther King Jr. and his family are presented playing the piano in the painting “Drum Majors” to represent not just the scene transpiring but the symbol of how King wanted to be remembered in his last famous speech and the current generation of leaders who invoke him and Coretta Scott King as their models.  This picture was originally included in my exhibition at LIGHTBOX gallery in Los Angeles in 2008 called “Good Leaders, Endangered Species, Ships at Sea Pt. 1”, because, at the time, when the political campaigns and debates had already begun for the next American President, I felt that good leaders were like an “endangered species” in a world that was like a “ship at sea”.  I have always been moved and inspired by Dr. King and the civil rights movement in general, and being born in 1966 have my own childhood affiliation with the memory of him (and the assignation and aftermath) on television and the media, and hope do whatever I can as an artist, teacher, and human being to contribute my efforts for equality and the recognition of the agency of all peoples in my life, which includes the fine art world of galleries and museums.  I love Dr. King and everything he stood for, and wanted to pay homage and respect with this painting (one of several I have created around Dr. King, including his appearance also in this exhibition in the background of the portrait of Rosa Parks).

While looking for another image of him, I stumbled across the photo I created this from in an old Life Magazine, and although it was small (and black and white) was struck by not just the obvious joy and togetherness it represented of his family, but also how wonderfully symbolic it seemed, with the parents “teaching” the children how to play, and the mirror in the background reflecting into “our space” to invoke the viewer’s position within the paradigm of the picture. Although the painting veers from photographic representation, I hope how its not like the photo is what is “me” about it, inspired while creating this listening to King’s speeches, audiobooks about him and the movement (especially “Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference” by David J. Garrow), and music he liked and listened to in his lifetime. The wallpaper, while painting this work, seemed to come alive, and I was aware of the angelic-like way King’s presence still works upon our world.  The debates between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were also playing out during the working process of painting this, and afterward, I was struck how, especially in the depiction of Dr. King’s son, my picture almost seemed like a younger version of Obama, as both Obama and Clinton invoked Dr. King repeatably in their remarks, and how generationally we’ve grown as a country because in part of King, his passion, and extraordinary work and sacrifice to even consider a black man (and a woman for that matter!) as President, much less elect him into office (now twice!).  The full quote is “Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter.”  Although the edited version of this was subsequently chiseled in (and now edited off) the King memorial in D.C., I thought at the time I created this work, that King’s legacy extended through his family generationally, and now to the world, where hopefully we are all “Drum Majors for righteousness,” learning in part from the lessons of Dr. King, his family and all their great work.  

Inspiration

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Jacob Lawrence, Tombstones, 1942, Whitney Collection. 

Jacob Lawrence broke out into the artworld at the young age of 23, when he gained national recognition of his 60 panel Migration Series, which, like the images in the installation, were a narrative series of paintings.  Way before Basquiat, he was one of the first African American artists to help open the window for people of color to be acknowledged by the art establishment, becoming the most celebrated African-American painter in the country. I’ve really admired his style of “dynamic cubism” to bring out the inner essence of feeling and atmosphere in his figurative narrative allegories that were both political and beautiful, emotional and culturally resonant.  He also created series of images that were not necessarily linear, hanging works salon-style to create a cosmology depicting the struggle for agency and freedom of great American people of color.

“Sleeper” is a portrait of my husband Andrew, from a photo I took one afternoon at our cabin in Riverside, California, through the window, with the reflection of the hill behind our home appearing simultaneously as the image through the window, in addition to the lens flare of the camera itself.  “Sleeper” is not only the subject matter of the image, but also a reference to one of our favorite Arthur Rimbaud poems, called “Sleeper in the Valley”, which describes the life surrounding a dead soldier in a field.  While Andrew is very much alive, the visionary aspects of the poem–which reflected upon the living agency of nature and the world transcending humans’ understanding of the normal everyday, is hopefully reflected in the reflection, and the mash-up of symbolic representation.  The narcissism of our ego’s filtering out the life of how our environment can defy categorization and understanding is something I feel is the artist’s job to expose, and someone like Goya, whose book appears on the nightstand, did this in extraordinary ways, allowing his symbolic allegories to jettison his hand and mind to paint ultimately ineffable works that we feel, but can’t completely explain away.  The book is next to a red plastic ball that reminds me of a clown’s nose, and I like the juxtaposition in that I feel much of my work seems like a tragic comedy, or Goya with a clown nose.  Of course the American Flag appears, invoking our great country but here in the form of a towel draped across an old chair (which like much of the furniture, including Andrew’s grandparents bed and nightstand, have much history and meaning for us).  In the room hang older works by me that I have given to Andrew over the years, including early framed Pinocchio drawings, and a large painting of a cat from the early ‘90’s (I’m proud to say other pet paintings of this series are owned by LACMA and SF MOMA).  I hope, with the pillowcase next to Andrew, that this work (in addition to all my art) ultimately defies language, like the great paintings and art that inspire me, and enjoy how the letters on the pillow begin to break apart in their folding and eclipsing elements.  Perhaps like what Andrew may be dreaming about, the reflection creates a surreal world beyond the cabin, and the light ball hovering in midrange (a reflection of the camera flash?  A lense flare?) also frustrates any easy reading of representation, breaking into abstraction or like a representation of the unconscious.  I enjoy painting all elements I see in photos as if “they are really there”, and see the job now, post-Richter of people that paint from photos as their source imagery, to penetrate the surface of the photo, and bring out the “third meaning” (to quote Roland Barthes’ idea), of what they as artists can bring to the photo, in not just their hand, but their conscious and unconscious minds.  If oil paint can make things look more “real” than most other mediums, perhaps oil paint can make the unconscious and emotional mind “real” and concrete in the plastic space of the picture plane.  Hopefully I’m doing this here, as I strive to think about all the wonderful things this picture conjured within me (most of all, my love for Andrew), when I created this painting, and hope that this all comes out in ways that, at the end, are felt but defy categorization. 

In many ways, like another of my painterly hero’s Vermeer, in his “Art of Painting”, this work is an allegory of what I believe I’m about as an artist and painter, and significantly begin the allegory of the whole “My American Dream” installation at the Whitney with this image.  “My American Dream” as a theme works both symbolically and literally, perhaps all the paintings in the exhibition, like the reflections presented in this picture (and the salon behind the sleeper), are elements and scenes of what Andrew may be dreaming about in the moment this picture describes.

Inspiration

I have always loved Hopper’s paintings, especially those inspired by films (which are many) and looking through windows, “Rear Window” style, revealing private moments.

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Edward Hopper, A Woman in the Sun, 1961, Whitney Collection.

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James Ensor, Tribulations of St. Anthony, 1887, Museum of Modern Art

One of my favorite paintings from my youth, and one that still capitivates today is the great “Tribulations of St. Anthony” by James Ensor at MOMA.  When I was in college I would come and stare at the amalgamations of strange beings culled from his imagination–and seemingly rendered from unconscious swirls of paint that he brought out later, consciously, to render for others to see.  Importantly for me, he was able to do this without “illustrating” them completely, like Dali might, leaving a painterly impression that creates a life and allows the figures to vacillate in the weird perspective planes that defy logic.  I hope that my unconscious spills out in micro-managed moments of my painting, and especially when rendering reflections, shadows, and other forms that are difficult for my left brain to ascertain, I feel the unconscious is allowed play when navigating the optical space my inner mind “sees”.

I grew up in Colorado, and my access to art was really through comics, and of course I loved Spiderman. I have taught comics at the School of Visual Arts since the early ’90’s (after publishing an acclaimed graphic novel Horror Hospital Unplugged, along with the writer Dennis Cooper), and I am the "Cartooning Coordinator" at SVA. In some ways, I see myself as an "avant-garde cartoonist" as many of my exhibitions are a series of juxtaposed images in a deliberate sequence that tell (albeit, and open-ended, nonlinear) stories. "Spiderman on the Roof" was originally in the Hamlet 1999 exhibition, in 2004, and there was like a Hamlet, trying to save the world as best as he could, specifically in juxtaposition to the King Kong painting next to it here (retaining a similar relationship from the Hamlet show). We lived in Soho at the time of 9/11, and saw the World Trade Center buildings with the holes in the side and the people inside, and witnessed (with my drawing students from NYU!) the collapse of both the buildings. It was all I can do to make this series of paintings near that time… I enjoyed the 2002 Sam Raimi/Tobey Maguire Spiderman film, and thought that this image of him would be perfect for "Rotoscoping" a Spiderman that was filled with real life and intrigue, fueled by my looking at the film still and thinking my thoughts about the last two years of New York, post 9/11, and wishing I could have done more to save the people in the towers, and the subsequent issues arising from the event—I was empowered, in that I had my health and acumen as an artist and a teacher, but of course the world events were hugely beyond any one person’s ability to make amends like a superhero.

The power of masked heroes, to paraphrase Scott McCloud’s famous "Understanding Comics" book, is the power of the icon. When Peter Parker is just Peter Parker he could be the kid next to you in the high school chemistry class—just another geeky kid. But when he dons his mask as Spiderman, he is red, with giant alien-eyes—he could be anyone. My theory on Spiderman is perhaps as a child you are reading a Spiderman comic in your bedroom with a flashlight, and maybe your parents are fighting in the other room—you can’t do much about your parents, but as you relate to the character in the comic, when he has his mask on he could be you—and you suture into the avatar of Spiderman, and as he thwarts evil, so do you! When I’m painting this or many of my works, I find myself transcending into the character and scene that I’m depicting, much in the same way you do when playing a video game or reading (or creating!) a comic, and I think I did so here, becoming Spiderman as I’m painting him, being in that space of that world to try to make it a better place. Specifically placed here in this installation, I see him trying to help King Kong who has already fallen, and Spiderman’s frustration that he couldn’t do more to help..

Inspiration. I still want to make a painting of the first appearance of Spiderman on the cover of Amazing Fantasy 15, from 1962. Originally a character created by Steve Ditko and Stan Lee, the cover was actually penciled by Marvel giant Jack Kirby, and inked by Ditko, as many mainstream superhero comics were and still are group efforts. Ditko was inspiring to Mike Kelley for his eccentric characters and drawing—he still lives, but is a libertarian recluse, self-publishing ranting comics about society, and in his earlier, slightly more sane days, he was able to propel life into his characters by channeling all of his conscious and unconscious ideas into his work, grounded by Stan Lee and his business and creative canny sensibilities. Kirby was also an amazing artist, able to create formal nuance, that if you turn his pages sideways to abstract them, and squint your eyes, they sometimes can create Pollock paintings from his amazing use of darks and lights, and his "Kirby Krackle" of positive and negative space. These are images that are fused with feeling, not about Duchamp/Warhol/Lichtenstein maneuvers of high and low, but more in the Guston/Saul tradition of identifying and "becoming" as you render the iconic avatar. One of my longtime favorite paintings at the Frick is The Polish Rider, allegedly by Rembrandt (although this has been contested). I still think it must be by the master, as the emotions and the mystery is so great in this painting, and whether or not he painted it (or if he had help by his pupil) doesn’t matter to me, as the Romantic intensity is so pervasive in this work. I think its an ideal idealized hero, the youth on horseback, on an adventure through a murky landscape, him standing out from the golden hues of the gravy-like colors of the background, on some mission for truth and justice it seems, or acknowledging with "great power comes great responsibility," something I was trying to convey in the tentative leap to heroism of our contemporary hero.

When 9-11 happened, I was living in Soho on Prince Street with my partner (now husband), and we heard the plane fly overhead and minutes later, saw it on the news and went outside to see, slack-jawed, the two buildings, with the holes in them and we could just make out the people inside.  I went to NYU to teach my Drawings Fundamentals class in a state of shock, and my students were there waiting, also hapless and not knowing what to do.  Normally, at the beginning of the semester I teach “Composition via the Gag Cartoon”, but was in no mood to do this on that day, and told the students that hopefully “we artists help to understand things by drawing them”, so we went to Washington Square Park with our sketchbooks to draw the towers, but just as we began, the towers began to fall.  The adults watching in the park began to scream and cry in pain and terror, but my students were amazing, comforting those around them.  I told them that class was obviously dismissed, and that they should go home and call their families to let them know it was all right. 

I had nightmares about the events since that time, and although my father who was in town during the crises kept the newspapers for me to render from (which I did eventually, one is in the permanent collection at the Whitney, a triptych of the theme is at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington), at the time all I could do (and felt tasteful enough to render) was to speak through allegory, hence this work, a painting from the film still of the 1976 King Kong remake, produced by Dino De Laurentis.  I have always felt that Kong represented the agency of humanity—who we are as natural human being animals within the world, and of course, through the power of iconic allegory, King Kong can mean so many different things in different eras through different points of view.  But at this moment it really felt that we lost so much during this time, not only all the people who were tragically and monstrously killed in the events, but also who we were as people and a country since that moment, the sentiments of which inform the emotions of this work. 

But also I grew up with Dynamite Magazine, a publication that young students subscribed to with the Scholastic Books Club as kids through school, and one of the first magazines that I got that I loved was with King Kong, celebrating the remake, with Laverne and Shirley in his arms.  The article had a great effect on me, and this image is from the pages of that magazine—the colors distorted in the printing era/paper of that time.  I also went to the premier of the movie when it opened in Tamarac Square (and was the official opening of this suburban Denver mall), and will never forget the excitement and thrill of seeing the film for the first time as a kid.

When I create works, I allow the image to infuse within me thoughts and emotions that I hope come out in the finished work.  With this painting, the conflicting feelings of nostalgia along with regret hopefully manifest themselves, which could also be, allegorically speaking, the nostalgia for a more innocent time and for the people lost of an era, and the regret of a more contemporary circumstance of who we are as people and a nation being transformed into a less innocent time of the 21century.

Inspiration

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Ben Shahn, The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti, 1931, Whitney Collection.

Ben Shahn has long been an inspiration, as he not only painted figurative narrative works from photos, but that he was able to infuse such life and emotion in a painterly fashion that they transcend notions of “illustration” and work, like an American German expressionist, to create political allegories that draw you in and have you become involved in their subject matter.  I also love that Shahn is a great American Jewish artist, and that you often see his works proudly displayed in this context, and he was exhibited in a time that anti-semitism still lurked in artworld circles.  This is a famous work often exhibited at the Whitney, that was part of a series of images he created about an infamous trial of two Italian immigrants and committed anarchists that were persecuted by their radicalism and their ethnicity more than the ambiguous evidence, to death for the murder of a shoe factory guard, creating one of the most controversial trials of the twentieth century.

I like that Shahn created history paintings that were liberal and smart, and that he had deep empathy for his subject matter that permeates the paintings and makes them trancend the specifics of the event he was depicting, making them hopefully eternal (like Goya and Manet before him) for conveying issues we still face today in painterly ways.

The source image of this was from a special effects book, which had this image, from the making of the 1997 movie Buddy, with creature effects by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop. When I essentialize ideas towards Post-Modernity, a major aspect seems to me to be “agency being reified into capital”, (I think of this like the human spirit, soul, ideas of independence being folded into, like flour into pizza dough, the “Capitalist Machine”).  Who are we as individuals may be influenced by ideology, in this case the ideology of phallocentric patriarchy, and so on. I remember asking my Semiotics teacher, in learning about language being like the software operating the hardware of our minds and consciousness, “if it all adds up to nothing, what is the point?” in a moment of nihilistic despair.  He replied “well, sometimes that is interesting to talk about”, which made sense to me.  Many of my Semiotics friends became Buddhist, and out of all the religions, I have had my hands hover over the flame of Tibetan Buddhism the most.  In that ancient religion, it realizes that everything exists, but doesn’t exist in the same manner we think it might (or have the language for), and I believe this gives a spiritual component to ideas of ideology and language forming thought—it doesn’t take what is beyond that away, and if we can achieve a critical distance to objectify oneself as a being within the world, we can think look at it and us in a different way (and hopefully in the realization of this come together recognizing we are all part of a larger system in a world that we need to take care of in order to survive).  Sometimes the epiphany of this achieves a momentary sublime, which I hope to someday affect with my work.

In any event, for me the gorilla is an iconic avatar for humanity in general, here controlled by the machine (of Capital?), but underneath this layer, this is a subjective human being, who hopefully has elements and a consciousness that be transcendent of subjugation.

As much as I consciously meditating upon these thoughts when painting the picture, being a son of a psychoanalyst and a painterly painter who loves modernity, I want to allow for my unconscious to also drive the picture, and hope that when, especially in micromanaging, abstract elements also come into the picture plane.  Here in the brain area, the small machinations of the mask became minute, and I hope that my unconscious is able here and in other parts of this (and all) my work, break into unconscious iconic abstraction, where my inner thoughts and memory take form in volumetric plastic space—when I look into these areas I see other worlds and planes.   When Cezanne painted, I think he was using the landscape he was perceiving to help map his inner thoughts with form and color, I hope I can do this here and also when looking at other images, reinterpreting through both my conscious and unconscious driving my hand and brush, to create optical surrealities within realities that are more reflections of the inner mind, like dreams, come to life, that transcend language.

Inspiration

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Willem DeKooning,  Door To the River, 1960, Whitney Collection.

I do believe that paintings can be “windows onto other worlds”—if oil paint was created and first used to depict things more concrete and actualized in the plastic space of the picture plane, couldn’t it also do this for thoughts, feelings, the unconscious?  Deep in the meditation of painting, when the hand is consciously creating marks that render “what you want”, it also is recording the “unconscious hand”, triggered by your thoughts, provoked by the subconscious, it simultaneously is translating your inner thoughts and iconic subconscious gestures.  I think this is what gives life to painterly paintings and modernism in general, and if you can suture this gesture with a post-modern relationship to your imagery that relates to the world outside of the picture plane, than hopefully you can have something new (or old, if you consider most of the great paintings of the past incorporate meaningful allegorical scenes along with transcendent painterly moves to create images that give you much to think about and feel while you are contemplating their subject matter and experiencing their aura).

This is a very important painting for me, and one of the earliest works in the show.  I am a spiritual person, always seeking, and although I hold my hand over the flame of some religions, I haven’t given myself over to any just one, but am fascinated and respect all.  My relationship to Catholicism growing up (beyond going to Southern Baptist bible school when I visited my grandmother!) was through Jesus Christ Superstar the musical.  My parents had the original Broadway cast recording (brown cover) when I was small, and I used to play it over and over, and sing the songs.  I also loved the movie when I was older, and still occasionally play both soundtracks and enjoy going back to that place of my youth, but also the great music and retelling of the story.  When Andrew and I lived on Christopher Street in the West Village in the mid 90’s, the building manager allowed me to use the basement as a studio.  Although small (and perhaps asbestos filled!) it had its own bohemian allure, and it was down there that I worked on this painting fervently over (for that period in my work) some time, and as it was a hard period, really seeking solace through the act of painting the work, which of course I did while listening to the soundtrack.  I feel it is my job to make the image better than merely the film still—I love the text by Roland Barthes called “The Third Meaning” which discusses “vertical” readings towards film stills—what you can’t put into words, the emotions, ideas, and experience that exceeds the conscious expectations of the film makers, that ultimately may make the image resonate deeply for the viewer.  Hopefully I was able to bring this out here, I wanted to capture a certain ecstatic quality of all of what this image could be about.  I tried and tried, and couldn’t quite get it right, but one day the electrician had to come and do some work in the building’s basement, and he knocked over the painting on my palate, causing the dots and smears to appear.  Eureka!  It was finished, as it seemed this blotches were like Jesus being stoned, and/or creating the binary in which his ecstasy seemed to counter…

This painting appeared in my first solo show in New York at Jay Gorney Modern Art in the fall of 1997.  I had begun to make a name for myself and work with creating narrative installations of drawings and paintings that were tightly controlled and nuanced, with specific stylistic antecedents and intentions.  When I had the show at Jay’s, it was in a period after moving to NYC, when I really wanted to get “to the batteries that were operating the engine” of my appropriated styles—what was “me” in my various works that gave them consistency and signature.  I began creating a lot of automatic drawings and paintings, and allowed myself to try to really suture into my works while creating, not thinking consciously about what I was doing, but being mindful of my thoughts about what the subject matter meant to me, hoping that would come through in the works.  I hung abstract “Iconscapes” (two of which appear in the Whitney installation) of essentialized forms truly culled from my unconscious next to these representational works.   At the time, in this prominent, street level in Soho gallery, the show was an anomaly.  In the time of “Art & Fashion” when most paintings were photorealistic, this show threw people, hopefully in a good way.  I think a good art show is like a bomb that goes off, in a good way, where hopefully people are challenged and it can help to change the discourse in a more positive direction.  With these kinds of shows, some people hate them, some people love them.  With my Jay Gorney show, simply titled “Keith Mayerson, Paintings and Drawings”, instead of appropriating/retelling narratives (I had emerged by a drawing suite entitled “Pinocchio the Big Fag”, inspired by a musical I wrote of the same name), the narrative this time was myself and my work and interests—much the same as the Whitney installation.  These roughly hewn works (while Chaim Soutine was being enjoyed uptown at the Jewish Museum, and Nicolas de Stael shows that inspired me were also being positively reviewed) were often misunderstood.  Were they relating to Thrift Store painting (Jim Shaw’s book and exhibition of thrift store art was around the same time), etc., was a common misconception…  I thought I was relating to modernity, early American Modernism if anything, works by Dove, Hartley, O’Keefe, Forrest Bess, Burchfield, Albert Pinkham Ryder and so on were important to me, as I felt a post Post-modern affiliation to that kind of ideology and practice.  While some of the collectors ran to the hills, many painters really loved and “got” the show, and I’m proud that these folks are still my friends (and some of them are younger, prominent artists who mentioned being inspired in part by this work and show).  It was also very positively reviewed later in Art in America, which printed this image, and Burlington Magazine, by the artist and critic Merlin James. I felt vindicated in 2011 when the GOOD people at Knoedler gave me one of their last project room shows of the Iconscapes, and certainly am proud to have it included in the Biennial.  We live with this painting, which gives us good energy and hope, and I placed it here near the Buddy Gorilla and POLICE Iconscape paintings, as if the Buddy Robot Gorilla is the human spirit emerging from the King Kong/9/11 painting beside it, which gives the energy hopefully embodied by the POLICE painting.  I love and was very inspired by Michelangelo’s Last Judgment for this installation, and Jesus here is like one of his angels, helping the soul of King Kong (and all the peoples it may represent) to ascend.

Inspiration

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Chaim Soutine, Le Groom, 1925, Pompidou.

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The Miracle of Christ Healing the Blind, El Greco 1570. Metropolitan Museum.

I have also always been a fan of El Greco, and his ecstatic rendering of Christ and other religious scenes.  Working from a tradition of Byzantine Icons, where the artist truly believe they were channeling the entity they were painting (which would almost come alive by their brush and “talk back to them”), I believe if you fervently believe in what you are painting, it does come alive, at least in your mind, but also hopefully in the mind of your viewer.  I think your unconscious spills out into your brush as you are painting like this, and amazing subconscious things occur in the paint—like subliminal advertising, unbeknownst perhaps even to the painter, strange things occur in the negative space, “interior negative space” and the nooks and crannies of the painting that the conscious, left-brain mind can’t control.  Famously in El Greco, eyes, faces, etc. happen in the folds of clothes (this is perhaps why Picasso and even Pollock learned so much by copying the master), and in this great painting in particular, above the blind man’s brow, an unconscious “third eye” appears like a Cyclops in his forehead…  I want this to happen as much as possible in my painting, I hope this starts happening in the ecstatic moments of this early work, and has continued to become more refined and embedded in my later works I’m painting now…

Although when I initially conceived of “My American Dream” to not have images that referenced things outside of our country, Stuart Comer felt strongly otherwise, especially in regard to this painting, which he felt was essential and was right.  The painting, of a wall in the Anne Frank House that remains basically as it was when Anne first wheat-pasted the images on it to give her hope, is a “key” or “legend” to the map of images in the installation itself.  Like her (but in MUCH less of a tragic way of course!) I grew up with posters salon-style hung in my room, mixing high and low, to give me hope, and continue to this day to live in environments of salon-style hangings of my own and friend’s work, among many other images, that feng shui my world.  This is a micro-managed world of the install itself, with high/low imagery mixed together, that I have truly painted in all these years to give myself hope, and as a young American when I first saw the wall on a trip after just graduating college, I had deep empathy for not only Anne but her writing and art (as did much of America, who read before Judy Blume her story, not just of the holocaust, but of her coming of age as a young independent woman and writer).

From a letter in 2009 to Daniel Belasco, then curator at the Jewish Museum in NY, for an article in book published in 2012 as “Suturing In: Anne Frank as Conceptual Model for Visual Art,” in Anne Frank Unbound: Media/Imagination/Memory, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Jeffrey Shandler, eds., Indiana University Press.

When I first went to the Anne Frank house in the late 80’s after college, I was deeply moved by the experience, and in particular, was struck by the way that she had pasted, salon-style, images that gave her optimism, contemplation, and hope in her room.  I found an affinity in how she was able to juxtapose art reproductions with pop iconography, and, by being on the same plane and surface, make powerful historical images equatable (and more personable) by bringing them next to charming illustrations and photos from her everyday world.  Certainly there is a melancholy associated with any photo of an almost-lost moment, and in the patina of time as the yellowing clippings became almost the same color as the mustard-palate wallpaper behind it, the collective peeling look brought out the synaesthetic emotions of the whole environment.

Several years ago when I went back to the Anne Frank house, I was struck again by her room—when she first pasted the photos on the wall she declared it to be (I’m paraphrasing here?) like a "huge drawing" and it really does work this way…  I also realized that I had spent a large part of my career making shows of open-ended narratives, by juxtaposing "high" and "low" images together in installations of paintings and drawings that have a distant cousin in that room.  The room, like the house, is a character in itself, and I was inspired to paint an image of the space photographed as it may have been furnished in her time, as it really resembled—and importantly, could stand in as an allegory for her experience—Van Gogh’s room, another Amsterdam hero.

When I paint my imagery based on appropriated sources and/or historical imagery, I research my topic seriously, as to fully understand what it is I’m creating an image of, and in the hope that not only will it have intellectual value in terms of its content, but that it might also resonate emotionally and transcend received notions and ideas to ultimately create an ineffable, sublime affect.  Much like a method actor who would suture his own life into his character in order to both better understand his subject and to breathe life and real emotion into his performance, I try my best to understand the person I’m portraying as I’m painting a portrait, or world of a person or a culture, as to help animate it and make it become alive.  Many of my thoughts regarding this are inspired by Scott McCloud’s great book Understanding Comics, when he discusses the power of an icon—that it is relatable to a large audience, and that, at least in the case of an essentialized iconic form like a cartoon, that "we" become "it" when we view the image.  Much like the Chinese monks who would enter into a state of "maw" when they made a screen or scroll—wanting themselves as artists, in addition to the viewer, to "enter nature", they would meditate while rendering and "become" the simplified figure in a complex background, using it as an avatar into that world, I sometimes use real-life icons to not only create allegories based on what people might know about that figure and how it operates within the context I created for it, but also, by my handling of the paint and formal nuance, for them to "feel" what the character might be feeling.  While painting anything associated with Anne Frank, for example, I listen to the audio tapes of her diary, music that was recorded around the same time that they hypothetically could have been listening to, and read research and view films about her and this period when I take breaks from my painting.  When I finished my first portrait of her (now at the Cleveland Museum!), it was at the end of a long process where I had listened several times to the entire audio of the diaries, and at the end of my painting the tape was at a biographic section describing her seeing her long-lost friend and her weeping, and I found myself crying looking at my painting and feeling for her.  Since then, I keep being drawn back to her as a figure (my last two shows in NY featured images of her, and my recent show in Amsterdam had over 10 drawings of her—one constituted over 40 tiny drawn portraits based on her photobooth pictures—-which I’m planning to turn into an animation soon), and hope that I learn more each time and the work has become even more nuanced.

With these two images, I’m hoping it might be interesting for the viewer to see what images perhaps inspired Anne Frank’s mind and optimism to make her incredible work, in addition, like in Rauchenberg’s famous "Rebus" painting, to make their own associations as to how to ultimately "read" the juxtapositions of images (McCloud calls this process "closure"—when the viewer creates the ultimate content when viewing just a part of something—for him, a sequence of panels depicting a larger scene).  While doing so, I also hope that it posits the viewer in Anne Frank’s POV, where they find themselves "suturing" into the role of Anne, as they look at the reproductions painted exactly to scale of her wall—basically they are looking at a tromp l’oeil of the original surface.  Like in the story "the Yellow Wallpaper", though, by allowing myself to meditate upon my own reflections and associations while painting these pieces, I hope something else slips through, and that my unconscious thoughts and emotions also become embedded into the work, making it animated and ultimately elusive of having specific fixed content and representation, while it moves into more emotional and psychological terrain that would ultimately help to encapsulate, or attempt to breach, the intensity and depth of what Anne Frank and so many others went through.  My work concerning Anne Frank is in honor of her, and all the other peoples who suffered, in the hope to keep their experience alive to teach us now what must never be forgotten…

Inspirations

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Jasper Johns, Racing Thoughts, 1983, Whitney collection.

Jasper Johns is, I believe, the greatest American painter alive, and I am in tremendous admiration of his invention, talent, and skill.  However, as much as I enjoy how he references art history, and builds upon the legacy of Duchamp, and becomes more autobiographical in his focus in his later years, the repressed emotive agency of his work is for me the frustrating aspects of the work.  I interpret the compressed, sublimated emotion, which of course might be my own misprojection, as mysterious as some of the ambiguity of his work, as tight-lipped as some older repressed homosexuals, or having the flattened out emotion that I’ve experienced sometimes in the work of Warhol and students (although many of them can be geniuses, like Warhol, who have ASD).  When viewing the great “Gray” show at the Met, I remember talking to a psychoanalyst, who was taking a break on a bench outside the exhibition in the gift shop, where I was trying to make a phone call.  She asked me if she “had to like it”, in her frustration trying to have empathy for the work, and although I did, of course I told her that art was subjective, and if she couldn’t find a way in, perhaps it just wasn’t appealing for her and that was fine.  And although I picked up some inkling of emotion, if this is to be something of value, in John’s “No” painting and others, it was cathartic to then visit, as an antidote, the works across the hall in the 19c European rooms, and regale to the colorful enchantment of Van Gogh, Manet, Monet, Gaugin, Picasso, and others…

Racing Thoughts, part of the Whitney Collection, has so many of the same nuances as the Anne Frank wall, with high images mixed with low, pattern and decoration, etc., symbols of death and mortality as well as life, Morandi with the bottles and more.  The painting is a key or legend for the painter, in that it has so many autobiographical elements in his citing of Castelli, his legendary dealer, next to a postcard of the Mona Lisa (who of course Duchamp put a moustache on famously), and invocations of his artistic past and bodies of work.  But the emotion is so sublimated, purposively so, as I believe it to pose questions about appropriation, the “ready-made”, pattern as decorative texture, and not illusion, etc.  But now, post-Duchamp, post-Johns, does it have to be so?  Can’t you have your cake and eat it, too?  I want to make work that is windows onto other worlds, onto feeling, and to use the images not only to remark and point to things and cultural aspects beyond the picture plane, but also to project my own thoughts and feelings into a transcendent world of space and emotion.

Beyond the short story by American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, written in 1892, that is considered as a feminist work in that the journal entries written by the narrator, who has been confined by her physician husband to a room with yellow wallpaper to “recuperate” from her “temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency” a misogynist diagnosis at the time, as she slips into psychosis as the wallpaper she is obsessed with becomes almost alive.   As I was listening to the diaries, the wallpaper here almost became alive, too, as it revealed, in its peeling patina, the feelings I was experiencing, having empathy for poor Anne as she struggled to remain optimistic in a claustrophobic world that was crumbling around her.

I painted this specifically for the Biennial, but also knowing it would—like a coming attraction for a movie—first appear at a NADA fair in Miami. I wanted it to be specifically at this fair, as being in Miami, Lincoln is a dynamic political image there that for me could be in part be an example of a "good Republican" who fought for the rights and agency of the American people, which in a time that race is still a factor, and the rights of LGBT people is in a current state of struggle, the vision of Lincoln seems more pertinent and dynamic than ever. More than merely Miami, however, I knew of and was creating my non-linear narrative installation "My American Dream" for the Whitney, and I absolutely wanted Lincoln to be included. I have rendered him several times before, in diptychs (with portraits with his cabin at his side-"Lincoln Remembers," from when W. Bush was first elected and I was missing my partner Andrew who was at our cabin in CA, a drawing diptych of Lincoln and Obama coming on stage for his inaugural address, and more). I have been thinking of Lincoln in the past few years and have been wanting to paint him again, collecting images and contemplating, and also waiting for the Spielberg movie-that serendipitously came out during this time-to subside so neither I or my viewer may be too influenced either by that wonderful interpretation by Spielberg and Daniel Day Lewis.

Like a method actor, while I am painting, I like to step in the shoes of the character I am portraying, and bring some of my own life to it to help bring life to the image. While painting this, along with the Mozart opera Lincoln loved, I listened to Team of Rivals (the unabridged version!). The original photo was taken by Alexander Gardner, (who at that time had become known as a civil war photographer, and whom Lincoln knew at his new studio at 7th and D Street, above Shephard and Riley’s Bookstore in Washington, D.C. He also had a new camera, which didn’t take as long to pose for, and Lincoln volunteered to be the first person he would photograph with it, on Sunday, August 9,1863, accompanied by his secretary John Hay in 1863, as Team of Rivals mentions. I was thrilled as I went to Brown University, where Hay went to school, and where now the John Hay Library is, and thought this was interesting and special! Lincoln was in a good mood as the tide was turning in their favor during the war. Evidently it was one of Lincoln’s favorite pictures of himself, that wasn’t seen much in his lifetime due to the uncanny out of focus elements of it, but this made a perfect image for me to paint from (Lincoln also took other photos for the purpose of creating a source image for his portraitist Matthew Wilson!). After looking and gathering Lincoln images throughout the years, I was drawn to this one as it really seemed to capture the expression of Lincoln winning the war, but quite cognizant of the great sacrifice it took upon the country and its peoples, and his giant beneficence-at only 55, Lincoln seems wizened beyond his years as the great emancipator. But also the background intrigued me, as it seems to be withholding all kinds of forms and symbols, which like the details of the floor and chair and table seemed to harness secrets to unpack. I love in the Old Masters, in micromanaged moments paintings fall into unconscious abstraction, and how in many modern works from Cézanne forward, how images may break apart into unconsciously realized figures and forms, and here, with perhaps a painted backdrop behind Lincoln, it seems to fall into other dimensions, perhaps the spirits or souls of those who he helped to save or whom were killed in his time of struggle. Nine days after his sitting John Hay, on the behalf of the President, wrote the following letter to Gardner, which Lincoln signed:

EXECUTIVE MANSION

Washington, August 18, 1863.

My Dear Sir,
Allow me to return my sincere thanks for the cards and pictures which you have kindly sent me. I think they are very successful. The Imperial photograph in which the head leans upon the hand I regard as the best that I have yet seen.

I am very truly, Your Obt Sevt,

A. Lincoln

I feel more than most other presidents, Lincoln helped to forge the ideology for civil liberties that my husband and I enjoy (having married after 20 years the first chance we could in CA before the window closed temporarily). Of course the rumored sexuality of Lincoln is very intriguing, if not provable (but I also think our contemporary ideas of homosexuality hadn’t even been formed at this time). But more than this, I like to paint images, when from appropriation, of people and scenes that give me hope, that I would want to aspire to be, to learn something about them more to give me clues on how to live a great life and to help others, and hope in painting these images, to inspire them about what inspires me about the picture. Adjacent to Sitting Bull and Annie Oakley, which are also studio views with painted backdrops, I hope this creates a triptych-like arrangement of American heroes that were ahead of their time in their struggle for agency and respect for themselves and others like them. As a part of this non-linear narrative of "My American Dream," in context, I hope that Abraham Lincoln becomes a wonderful patriarch of an America that I want to live in, that has given me the freedom to do what I do as an artist and teacher and person, along with so many others who enjoy the rights these people helped fight for. In the super salon installation, I do see it like a comic on the wall, with each painting like a panel in a comic, juxtaposed to create meaning, but also like a mural, a "gay Guernica," but in a good way, or Last Judgment, or a Thomas Hart Benton. Although I have done salons in the past, for the Biennial, I was thinking of the early years of the Whitney, where salon shows of "figurative narrative allegory" were more common, now heightened (literally, as the tallest painting grazed the Breuer cement ceiling, and the bottom pictures just touched the floor!) to bring attention to the fantastic architecture and its history, not just to bespeak for the Whitney and its past, but also for the Met (whose art both within the American Painting wing and much beyond continues to inspire me) and its future, as obviously the building’s new home will be for the visions that great museum will bring to it!

Inspiration. This great Velazquez at the Prado traveled to the Met, and was a huge inspiration to me—of the Holy Trinity crowning of Mary, it is both rendered fastidiously, but also has the life and nuance of a spiritual unconscious driving the work. It has more life to me than the American Gilbert Stuart’s famous presidential portraits, such as the Lansdowne Portrait of Washington at the National Gallery, which seems awkward and stiff. And although I love these early American (and based on life and photos, perhaps for the first time) portraits of Lincoln by his contemporaries Healy and Wilson. I do love some of these early American works, and even though Stuart was like a Warhol of his time, as he repeated motifs and did many copies of the same portrait of Washington for money, he was also able to paint transcendent beauties like the Skater in the National Gallery. As much as I appreciate these great American Portraits, I think we can revisit historical paintings with less academic restraint, and like the old masters, try to invoke a spiritual, subconscious, transcendent painterly poetry to the proceedings, that not only depict these great figures, but also allow for the images to portray the inner personality of the people, and the ineffable effect they ultimately had on our world and culture.

When I had my breakout show “Pinocchio the Big Fag,” my thesis show from UC Irvine that had traveled to Rick Jacobsen’s seminal Kiki Gallery in San Francisco, the Drawing Center in New York, and finally Richard Telles Gallery in Los Angeles, I had appropriated different styles to create a salon of drawings that were like different plates from children’s books, as if my version of Pinocchio had existed along with the history of the original. From there, I really began, in a Post-Modern conceit, to appropriate styles to harbor the good baggage of how style can carry content, and so on, and had become somewhat known for having an agile hand, and tight rendering control. But during this time of the early 90’s, I was reading the first of the John Richardson Picasso biographies, and realized if Picasso wanted to create a still-life one day, he would do this, the next day if he wanted to do a portrait, he would create one, the next day a synthetic cubist image, he would paint this. Picasso said (I’m paraphrasing) “if you draw a circle without the aid of a compass, the imperfection is your style” and also “if you copy the Old Masters, how it’s not like the Old Masters is what is “you” about it..”. When my husband Andrew got into grad school in New York, I drove our old Daihatsu back to the city from LA, and I was listening to Brian Wilson’s Beach Boy’s, and I realized in his genius, Wilson was able to fuse the words/lyrics of his songs with the music to become one. When I arrived in NYC, I really felt that I wanted to get the “batteries that were operating the engine” of my different styles, to be able to get to the core, the emotive truth, of what those images was about. Why was I art directing myself in all these appropriations, instead of, if it was possible, to aestheticize pure feeling? I felt in a post Post Modern world, paintings COULD be windows onto other worlds, that paintings COULD be emotional, and have a “life of their own.” Instead of Jasper John’s targets, amazing Duchampian moves in painting for their time, but also subdued graphic images that were about their own objecthood than portals into space, could I make a work that had it’s own internal energy? Inspired somewhat by Van Gogh’s lights and stars, and even just the notion that supposedly “crazy people” drew and painted circles (in addition to Louise Bourgeois insomnia drawings) I started to create circle paintings and drawings (and other automatic renderings from my unconscious that I deem “Iconscapes”), that I wanted to have vacillate back and forth, like the “batteries were included” and that the painting would have a life of its own. I love Op Art, as I think when we are perceiving those illusions, although of course the painting itself isn’t moving (unless its kinetic!) when we become conscious of our own minds doing the work of the visceral sensation the work induces, it can create the sublime moment of self awareness and self objectification. I also still teach in drawing and painting foundation classes the “circle drawing/painting” where I have students put down a dot of color, and from that, after learning color theory and the color wheel, have them instinctively choose different bands of color/texture, with the ultimate goal of having the work go “whoopee-woopie-woo” or for it to have this energy of movement, push and pull, moving back and forth. It’s a terrific exercise for them to employ different affects of color theory in a concrete, fun way, and its amazing the personalities that individuate each of their works, that are always different in emotive tone and texture and palate—super constructive in having them not only learn about color and materials, but a simple, direct way for them to express who they are in works.

This large Iconscape was one of the last that I had created—I was able to show these in major group shows, including Luhring Augustine, Matthew Marks, Pat Hearn, and in my shows at Jay Gorney, however, as I had become known as the “circle painting guy” in part, they began to feel a bit like production, and I always want to keep my work vital and pertinent. But this one I really wanted to fly, to be intense, and when we had it in our home, Andrew insisted I turn it around, as he couldn’t handle how vibrant it was, something I felt must have been the success of the painting. After my Iconscapes were somewhat misunderstood, but also appreciated by the inner art world and by other artists, it was vindicating that the good people at Knoedler gave me a project room show of these works from the 90’s in 2011, and a wonderful couple bought this painting. Long after being stored in our cabin in California, and brought it to their penthouse directly across from the Whitney! Like a beacon, I feel that it was calling the Whitney to it, or visa-versa, and it was incredible to have it finally travel across the street to the installation. I am inspired every day by Picasso’s Guernica, and serendipitously, feel that the entire install resembles Guernica a bit, and like his lightbulb (of God?) in that composition, I feel that this is like a giant light, god’s eye, or mandala (traveling up from the Dalai Lama at Radio City Music Hall beneath it, becoming manifest and in the real space of the room?), and the heart, or light, of the installation of the composition.

From appropriating imagery to paint from, inspired by Post Modernism and the Pictures Generation, to appropriating film stills (inspired in part by Roland Barthes’ great text “the Third Meaning”), to appropriating from historical photos, I realized that the more I was able to get to the source of the image, to draw from it the emotive and atmospheric weight of the image, the more “real” the image was, the more rich incredible things I was able to perceive, feel, and paint from the image. 

Although I’m not religious, per se, I’m a pretty spiritual person, and if there is one religion that makes sense to me, it would be Buddhism.  A lot of my fellow Semiotics friends from Brown have become Buddhists!  If part of Semiotics was about the power of language, how “language is the software that programs the hard drive of your brain and consciousness to perceive the world”, Buddhism is the ancient ideology of this—everything exists in the word that you see, but perhaps not in the way that you perceive it. I remember in a Semiotics class at Brown, I asked my professor Michael Silverman in a moment of nihilistic defeat, “if everything adds up to zero, what’s the point of it?” and Michael retorted “Well, it’s pretty interesting to talk about!”.  Buddhism for me gives a deep spiritual component to all this…

I’ve seen the Dalai Lama speak on a number of occasions, and while he always starts out “cute” and “sounding like Yoda”, very quickly he gets very deep and complex into philosophy, and it’s almost impossible to keep writing notes and you have to give in and just listen very thoughtfully and carefully.  By the third day of this teaching, few people had come back, and the feeling was very woozy and transcendent: it felt as if we were all on a giant spaceship taking off into another dimension, especially at this point where the Dalai Lama was deep into chanting prayer.  If you believe Tibetan Buddhism, he is the reincarnation of the Chenrezig Buddha in the thangka painting behind him, and in fact, the whole scene started resembling the painting, with the video screens on either side of him like the small Buddha’s on clouds on either side, and the architecture of the hall like a giant mandala, and the lens flares (I like to paint all the aspects of the photo as if they were real!) like floating mandalas throughout the scene.  I really wanted to capture the transcendent, ecstatic experience of being there, which was truly transformative, and listened to audio books of the Dalai Lama while painting this, along with many cd’s of Tibetan Buddhist prayers. 

A Buddhist would say that a chair isn’t necessarily a chair, it’s “pieces of wood bolted together, etc., and if you stand on it, it’s a ladder!” and I use this analogy when teaching students about drawing and painting things “as they really are” to objectify what you are perceiving in a manner beyond language—when you are delineating negative space to perceive positive space you are literally reading “between the lines” and thinking “outside the box” of perceived ways of looking at things and learned language, which can really obstruct how you create visions of “reality”.   When painting this, the interdependence of the elements really came across to me, in the micromanaging of positive and negative shapes, forms, color, etc.  and it was a lengthy, but amazing experience that I hope gives the work a life of its own and emulates the experience.  Fun fact, Richard Gere is the gentleman with the white hair and dark suit to the right of His Holiness, and at one point, the Tibetan institute contacted me about using the image, but never followed through!  I hope that Hi Holiness might have seen this image (or the other images I have created of him and of the Karmapa!) and would have approved!

Inspiration

Edward Hopper and his wife used to go to the movies every day, and he was inspired for his work to create images that were like film stills, in addition to embracing the architecture of classic New York buildings and interiors, that have also inspired me so much.

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Edward Hopper, New York Movie, 1939, collection of the Museum of Modern Art, NY

From 2005 when I first painted this picture:

This is from an image from the original crash site, painted on the 50th anniversary of the James Dean’s death… I wasn’t thinking of this however when I was painting it, it was from a James Dean book (James Dean: American Icon, with the photos archived by David Loehr, owner of the James Dean Museum, that I have subsequently become friendly with) that is I felt compelled in the middle of the movie “Room With A View” that I was watching one summer day when I was at Brown to run out to the bookstore and get…

Obviously this relates to Andy Warhol disaster series… If painting is like punk rock, which is essentially about "killing your father" to do something new, Warhol is the father to kill in order for art to progress into the 21 century…. After all is said and done, I really believe that Warhol was a pock-marked gay poor kid from Pittsburgh who really wanted to BE Marilyn Monroe, and that his work was saturated with the pathos of the agency being reified into commodity culture, and his work is exemplary of a culture spinning out of control, and talked about it in a spiritual way… However, this isn’t how his work was considered in his time, and the "slip-shod" way of his "non-hand" silk-screening a painting surface was all about HIM killing the fathers of abstract-expressionism, and perhaps Picasso and all that came before…

But what if Warhol painted like Rembrandt? Or Van Gogh? Or Velasquez? With all of the ideology (modernist? or what came to be considered the ideology of modernism–i.e. its not the subject matter that was important, but what you bring to the subject matter that is important? The mind of the artist, the subconscious, the transcendent and perhaps SUBLIME affects of painting?)…

I think that post-modernism has opened up so many doors and windows considering the politics that surround art and the language in which we interpret it, that the time for painting being able to be PAINTING while at the same time smart and true to the culture in which it is brought out in is possible…

While painting this I was thinking how his car crash is emblematic of a culture that is currently embracing cars, oil, technology and so on in such a manner as to disregard where it is leading us…. James Dean is the humanistic sincerity of all of us caught up in a system that doesn’t care, that will ultimately serve to destroy the people that help to drive it… I love Van Gogh, but wasn’t thinking consciously of him or his work when I was doing this; it just came out that way… I love looking at the space in modernist (and premodern) paintings in the subconscious pockets of plastic space that appear in the negative space between things, think that the artist was able to have their inner mind (or eye, or spirituality) spill out into the works, giving it the alchemy of life. There are many wild pockets of activity in this painting, and I have spent hours gazing into it, interpreting it… I feel that James Dean is in the back car seat, and saw in the photo what I took to be Christ or an angel lifting him up… I’m not a religious person, but a spiritual one, and found that unlike many of the other posed photos I appropriate, this real life scene was saturated with Third Meanings that gave it such a life that it seemed like a recording of an otherworldly event… Whether or not this is true, certainly when painting it I felt driven and inspired as my subconscious took over, describing the death of one of Americas great iconographic actors that came to an untimely end, surrounded by the patriarchal-like figures of his mechanic (who miraculously?) was thrown to safety, and those who happened (?) to be at the scene to help to pick up the pieces…

Inspiration

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Andy Warhol, Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster), 1963

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Van Gogh, Harvest at la Crau With Montmajour in the Background 1888

From 2005 when I first painted this picture:

This is from an outtake from the filming of Giant, when Dean has had his makeup applied for the scene when he finally strikes (and becomes covered in) oil, both bringing on his financial success and his spiritual demise. I was listening to the liberal talk radio “Air America” through the painting of this and many of the other images in the show, and feel this is a commentary on Iraq, and subsequently, all other decisions by the Bush administration to prioritize oil and profit over humanity. This is “blood for oil” with a lusty relish, “God” is in his pocket (with his emblematic chain), as the “Good Old Boys” in the background look on…

In the slippery slope of allegory, however, I feel this has more than one meaning… Like most of the other images from the show in which I first exhibited this painting (Rebel Angels at the End of the World, QED Gallery, LA, 2005), this was derived from a black and white (and fuzzy!) image, and I part of the artistry of painting these images comes from projecting onto them not only emotionally and thematically, but also formally, creating color interpretations for values that I see, and hopefully creating synaesthetic worlds from those interpretations. I love painting, and quite frankly, really enjoyed painting this (as with all the works in that show!) and feel that my love for OIL (painting, that is!) is hopefully conveyed in this work (in addition to all the other layers on interpretation)…

Inspiration:

Velazquez, Pope Innocent X, 1650 and Francis Bacon, Study After Pope Innocent X, 1953

Of course the Francis Bacon painting after the Velazquez portrait of Pope Innocent X is intense and great, and well-earned in its legend.  But of course the original Velazquez is hard to beat, as it’s a master painting by the master!  Bacon, as amazing as he is I feel tires after a while—he usually feng-shui’s the figure as if it got lost in a psychological photoshop, in a distilled, Matissian-color field background, with pathos, over and over again—not exactly formula—but seeing his retrospective, I wonder if it was almost like listening to Joy Division every day without a break—even the Smiths had more of a sense of humor and balance, and couldn’t a gay guy like Bacon get a break (although who am I to belittle a contemporary master like Bacon, and I do get a more Picasso-esque interiority and nuance of being in his work when I want)…  But Velazquez, kind of like Lucian Freud, I think does a thing harder—instead of people screaming in boxes to have emotive effect, I think its in the layering of the skins of paint, the micro-managed moments, that have a wonderful range of intensity and personality in his sitters.  Can you have your cake and eat it, too, exaggerating some of the moments, but also embed them in figurative representation closer to life?

Willem  de Kooning, Woman, 1950

Another contemporary Master, de Kooning, recognized the power of talismans to riff off into a spasm of emotional abstraction—his epiphany was the weirdness of objectifying the orifice of the mouth, spurring on his imagination to create his powerful Woman series—not to get into the complicated politics of this, and loving his ability to slide from representational into the abstract, but could you bring the mouth back to the figure and also have it reside in plastic space that adheres to form and still have the intensity, and abstraction in micro-managed moments like the old masters?

After years of painting from appropriated imagery, I have been more and more inspired to paint from my own pictures, wanting complete autonomy and authorship of the image, and also realizing that by painting from photos that I myself took, I have a direct connection with the image and subject matter, and somehow even more feelings and thoughts hopefully become transmuted into the painting. I was inspired by T.J. Clark’s book “The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers”: a post-Marxist critic, Clark discusses in this how the impressionists didn’t want to paint the tourist-y parts of Paris, but the sections where the gentrification of this city was affecting the people who lived there, and the transfiguration of the city itself.  I wanted to paint sections of New York City that were vital to me, but perhaps forgotten or overlooked by the tourists and even current residents, and love the New Yorker Hotel, which we see all the time when we go to the movies across the street.  Just down from the Empire State Building, the New Yorker hotel was built around the same time, and is an amazing art-deco masterpiece that has endured throughout the ages.  One of the largest hotels in the world when it was first built in 1928, it was like a micro-city, with the “largest power plant in the United States” at the time, with the largest barber shop in the world, five restaurants (and 10 dining salons), 92 “telephone girls” and ballrooms that hosted many of the popular Big Bands, such as Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey.  Spencer Tracy, Joan Crawford and Fidel Castor stayed there (as did my Uncle when he first came to New York!), and Nikola Tesla spent his last decade there.  In 1971 Muhammad Ali even recouped there after his historic fight with Joe Frazier at the Garden.  It closed for a while, and then was taken over by the Moonies—the Unification Church of the United States!  Gradually they relinquished their claim on the property, and it became a hotel for the public again, joining the Ramada chain in 2000 and is now part of Wyndam Hotels.

For me, the building is almost like a “King Kong” of buildings of the city, reminding me of New York’s former glory, coexisting with it’s 21 century comrades of contemporary architecture, and holding its own—barely (sometimes the lights in the iconic sign are out—I always remember the Saturday Night Live guests would stay there and they would plug the hotel with a slide of the sign in the 70’s), and I often hear rumors of its closing.  But like how hopefully New York still stands strong as the power center of our country, which still holds its own as the great nation of the world. I feel its symbolic of our resilience as a city and as a country to stand for the values we hold dear and to keep fighting for our strength and nation.

Inspiration

I have always loved early 20c paintings by American modernists of buildings and architecture, especially those of Sheeler and Demuth (and Bellows!) that seemed to be remarking on America’s growth and industry, in addition to nostalgia for bygone years soon passing in the industrial age, and the elements of abstraction that happen in the tight-lipped repressed way they painted.

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Charles Sheeler, River Rouge Plant, 1942, collection of the Whitney Museum.

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Charles Demuth, My Egypt, 1927, collection of the Whitney Museum.

I had a show in Brussels during the time of my 40th birthday, and as a result, Andrew and I (he is my same age) had a “40th Birthday Blowout” and stayed in Amsterdam and Paris, in addition to Brussels.  At the Van Gogh Museum at the time, there was a Rembrandt/Caravaggio show, and it was like one of those Sundays Titans of Rock concerts, because all our favorites were under one roof!  “Love Triumphant” is inspired by one of the great Caravaggio paintings that was exhibited there, in addition to the notion, looking at these great Old Masters, that they would always micro-manage to the macro-managed whole, much like Van Gogh but tighter, where the unconscious would still spill into the picture plane much like the looser Van Gogh’s would—and in a sublime way. The surfaces of all these masters are so activated by their wicker-like weave of painterly like strokes that it would make the scene come alive—much like when you are a child, and when you are outside, everything is alive as you are taking things in for the first time without having the language of understanding that helps to subdue the consciousness into not seeing how things and yourself exist in the air and in the world.  When I first saw the Caravaggio painting in Germany when I was first out of college, it was funny as their were blue-haired old ladies lovingly admiring what I saw was an extremely subversive painting—this naughtily cherub-like angel was exposing his rectum in the first (and perhaps the only) painting I’ve every seen that had a male figure show this body part!

The source image for this painting was from a notorious photo that circulated in gay publications in the ‘70’s that was reputably of James Dean in a tree, showing all.  James Dean was gay, or at least “Hollywood Bisexual”, and its been well documented how he was sugar-daddied into Hollywood, and had many gay intimate relationships, and was very free and open with his attitude and body—there is little reason NOT to believe this is James Dean!  He also changed culture in that he was the first to give a voice to a youth generation, post-Judy and Mickey “putting on a show”, and inspired Elvis to be Elvis and John Lennon to be John Lennon.   He wanted to be on the Mount Olympus of culture, to be on top with Michelangelo and Picasso in terms of how they thought anew and made art that made a world think differently, and the three films he made before he died at the age of 24, did just that, leaving a legacy that still endures and inspires to this day.  I feel that if there is a heaven, he is there, and I hope in the installation that is inspired by Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, here he is like a Seraphim angel, close to God, with the trees and branches and leaves acting like wings, looking down upon us from his heavenly point of view (after crashing in the car painting and being resurrected in the Gusher painting below him).  In the first Biennial I ever saw in 1987 there were outrageously queer paintings by McDermott and McGough, and I was so inspired by these as a still coming-out-of-the-closet gay youth, and I felt so vindicated and “saved” by these works, and coveted secretly the images in the catalog, secreting it away from my parents to look at the images in the privacy of my room, feeling a sense of community and worth through the images.  I hope that by having this painting in the show, I can also inspire young people today to not feel shame for their bodies, and also feel the exalted love for self and agency that I feel James Dean is expressing in this picture, one of the highlights of how his personality helped to shape the world and make it a better place today.

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Inspiration

Another inspiration for this work is the portrait of John Perreault, by the great Alice Neel.  He was a curator, looking for paintings for a figurative painting show he was organizing, and Neel convinced him to pose for him “in flagrante” for her.  Although she didn’t get curated into his show, the amazing portrait gets the last laugh for Neel, who makes one of the most vulnerable, tender and raw paintings of a man I have seen.

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Alice Neel, John Perreault, 1972, collection of the Whitney Museum.

I grew up with the Muppets, they were my iconic avatars in understanding the nature of the world.  Jim Hensen was obviously a genius, and I think the best kind of artist in that he used his art to make the world a better place (and had no worries in getting the work out there and also being successful).  Kermit the Frog was also Hensen’s avatar, the Muppet that he felt the closest to, who spoke for him.  Sometimes artists can be fairly inarticulate when it comes to speaking, but are able to create their work, their own “Frankenstein Monsters” that walk and talk and speak for them, and Kermit was like this for Henson.  Puppeteering is very close to cartooning and other kinds of artmaking, in that puppets (or lines on a page in comics) aren’t alive, but in the case of Kermit, pieces of felt (and ping pong balls originally for the eyes!) that have Henson’s hand up the “butt” of the puppet who animates it and makes it come alive.  Art is about alchemy, and the spirit of Henson is what created the persona of Kermit—while the character lives on, and is portrayed by a new puppeteer post Henson’s death, isn’t quite the same as when Henson was breathing life into him.  However, I am interested in how characters (and great art in general) has a life beyond their creators—I do think that Kermit has a life of his own that extends beyond Henson and even the Muppets, now Disney owned, in the minds of people throughout the world that identify and relate to this iconic character, and feel they know him and is a friend in their imaginations. 

When the Muppet Movie first came out in 1979, it blew my (and most children’s!) mind to see Kermit in this famous scene riding a bike, in a full body shot, without Henson’s, or anyone’s hand controlling the puppet, nor strings or any other perceivable devices—it was as if Kermit truly was his own being, alive and well, and able to ride a bike to fame and stardom (this was just after where Dom DeLuise, portraying a agent, finds Kermit singing in the swamp and encourages him to go to Hollywood to become a star to make “millions of people happy”.  Just after this scene, Kermit is almost run over by a steamroller, controlled by “Doc Hopper” who subsequently wants Kermit to subjugate him to be a mascot for his fast food chain for fried frogs legs. Kermit’s line, after he magically appears on the top of the steamroller says “…if frogs couldn’t hop, I would be gone with the Schwinn”.  This is funny, but also symbolic of his character and the Muppets in general: although Henson was wildly successful, he never “sold out” in that he used his characters and his talents to entertain children of all ages, whilst at the same time gently portraying a fuzzy hippy ideology of cooperation, empathy and compassion, that particularly affected my generation in the primary mode of the Muppets creation on Sesame Street, and as we grew older, the Muppet Show and the Muppet Movies (and all their spin-offs), and continue to enchant generations, despite our post-analog, ADHD world of videogames, CGI, irony, and quick editing. 

This is from an image in the Muppet Movie Book, which I also owned and cherished (along with all the commercially available Muppet puppets—I could do all the voices!—and soundtracks, books, etc.)  As I love Monet and the work of the other impressionists, who as Modernists were also able to bring out their perception of reality and to use landscape as a map onto which to project their unconscious, as I painted this I listened to the Muppet soundtracks, movies, and shows, allowing myself to regress to this more innocent time in the hope to infuse into the painting my emotions and feelings of my younger self.  I also, in a post-post modern way, think that paintings CAN be windows onto other worlds, to the unconscious, and want to use the painting, just like the phenomena of seeing Kermit as his own agent, without any strings or hands controlling him, to make a painting that has a life of its own, with a character that seems alive in a world of nature, where the human created being, in a good Frankenstein Monster kind of way, is as alive as the environment surrounding him (which also breaks into unconsciously realized other worlds of my subconscious).  A friend during this time told me that I should “peddle as fast and as hard as I can” to get where I want in my life and career by the time I was 50, and I also, from my mature adult perspective, was meditating on this, with Kermit as my avatar that I was suturing into, wanting to appreciate all that life has given me, to work as hard as I can, like Kermit (and Henson) did, in the hope and aspiration to make my own life and career even better, so I can have my art make the world a better place (without selling out!), before I, like the bike and Henson himself, was “Gone with the Schwinn”.

Inspiration

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Monet, The Parc Monceau, 1878, Metropolitan Museum

Of course Monet is amazing, beyond blue-haired old lady art and posters on freshman co-ed’s walls, he really knew how to paint, helped to create an art movement that changed the world, and also had, along with his mentor Manet, a lot of politics in his pictures, from the Steam Engines remarking about the industrial age to the personal politics of his life in Paris and the Simulacrum of his paradise he created for himself in Giverny and his paintings of optical space that created new realities, through light and his cateracts.   I do think that painting can give new light to preconceived notions of landscapes and space, and make new realities out of oil that are real—in the mind of both the artist and the viewer.  Like Kermit exists beyond Jim Henson’s hand, the world of Monet’s water lilies is alive in the worlds consciousness, and when you view his earlier paintings, like this lovely little gem in the Met, his perceived reality becomes your own and you are transported into the romantic space of his perceived world that becomes alive in your imagination—and strange worlds also exist in his tempered strokes that, like Cezanne’s interior negative space of rocks and foliage, give us an insight also into dream worlds beyond the painters consciousness that seem palpable and alive.

Superman is a painting appropriated from the very first comic strip that Siegel & Shuster created, from Jerry Siegel’s writing and Joe Shuster’s art. I grew up loving Superman, and like many iconic avatars that children suture into, he helped to form a non-religious model of what it takes to be a good person, and was inspired by the comics to create my narratives today.   Superman of course is an assimilation story, and Siegel & Shuster, like most of the early American comic creators, were Jewish, and Superman was a vehicle for them not just to entertain the masses, but also to allegorically speak about their own plight to be great Americans.   I painted this during the Bush/Kerry debates, and unconsciously felt afterwards that he resembles a bit Kerry, who I was for during this time to help to save America.  I feel that post-Warhol, instead of just appropriating comics in a Duchampian mode, it is my job to bring emotion to the image for what it projects from me, and how, as like a method-actor, I try to step into the shoes of the characters I’m portraying, can help to bring them to life.  Superman feels pensive to me, like I felt about New York, post 9-11, during this time, and I hope that the repeated lines of the arms and hands indicates movement and feeling.  Bringing color naturally to the appropriated image of a patinaed newspaper image, Superman also feels to me a bringing an old world, black and white world to help save the more colorful 21-century.   Also unconsciously, as I painted, the letters in his name seem to emphasize the letters S PERM AN and I like this, as it perhaps satirizes gently the perhaps aware of the Patriarchal undertones of the image (along with the phallic building behind him), while still hopefully carrying the warm feelings I have for this great character that still as important today as when he was first created.

Inspiration

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Warhol, Superman, 1961, from the collection of Gunter Sachs

Originally created for a show entitled “Kings and Queens”, I painted this image in homage to a woman who, despite her humble origins, changed the world by in 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, refusing to obey the bus driver’s order that she give up her seat in the colored section of the bus to a white passenger after the white section was filled.  Although she wasn’t the only person during this time to resist segregation, NAACP organizers thought she was the best candidate for seeing through a court challenge after her subsequent arrest for civil disobedience.  As an international icon of resistance to racial segregation, she worked with Dr. King, who was a new minister in the area, to gain international support for the civil rights movement.  For me growing up learning about the movement and civil rights, Rosa Parks was a very warm and compassionate “motherly” figure that helped me and so many others understand, even by just images of her and her smile, the incredible need for all people to treat each other with respect and equality.  While I also loved Martin Luther King, he was more at a regal, patriarchal, and “great leader” remove—while of course I respected and admired him, Rosa Parks for me was a direct and immediate persona to cathect to as a child would a mother or female figure, and help me to emotionally understand what had happened and how far we still needed (and need) to progress for equality.  Through different stages of my life, from traveling through Montgomery and visiting the sites of the movement in college, to now (after painting many images towards this subject matter), I continue to learn (while painting this and similar subjects, I listen to audio books about the civil rights movement and more) and understand the complexities and struggles of this time that continue to permeate to this day.  In the installation of “My American Dream” these two figure help to forge the countries ideology of where my husband and I can be married and happily live and be accepted as a couple, and where hopefully we all can be free to be who we are and live the lives that we want to without fear of subjugation and hate.  I love Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King and their legacy, and hope this painting does some justice as an homage to them, my feelings and sentiments towards who they were, and acts as a historical painting to remind all of their importance in addition to their humanness.

Inspiration

Peter Paul Rubens, Four Studies of A Head, first half of the 17th Century, Royal Museums of Fine Arts, Belgium

In the museum in Brussels, they have this knockout little painting study of Rubens painting studies of a Moor, whom he also painted later as a portrait, which was really an edifying surprise to see there, or a person of color (who is not in a servile position) in any Western museum.  I love the dignified approach to his subject, who seems like a real person that you could know, painted with a warmth and style that supercedes his larger commissioned and cooler work.  I don’t want to make the same mistakes of most of art history, that deny the agency of people of color, and want to paint the people that inspired me and my world equally, disregard less of gender, race, creed, or color.  I hope to bring a warmth but also respect to all my subjects.

I was asked by Ingrid Sischy in 2008 to "cover" the Haute-Couture shows in Paris, for what turned out to be her last issue of Interview Magazine. I was honored (and surprised!) for this great "assignment," and was able to convince the magazine to allow me to bring (although we paid for our own extra expenses!) Andrew Madrid, my husband, as my "assistant" (although really he came along for just emotional support, and "the ride of a lifetime"!). This was during the time of the Democratic debates for President, and also right on the cusp of the economic crises that we were just feeling the beginnings of the permutations of. Ironically, Andrew and I were living on our credit cards, but being hoisted into this amazing bubble of wealth and fantastic prosperity, despite our own bohemian economic situation. After coming back from these amazing shows of fashion and pomp and circumstance, we would retreat back to this fancy hotel (along with the other working class glamorous models who flew coach back home and lived cheaply after they took off their extreme dresses), and were grounded by watching the debates and the issues that they brought up. It was fantastic to watch Obama, who I was and am for, his intellectual honesty and humanness, in these debates, especially at the time, as he cut through the pomposity of the world that we were in Paris, and told it "like it was." I painted this retroactively after he already became President, remembering all this, during a time that Andrew was extremely sick, and part of my emotional motivation was caring for him through painting, while he was at my side in bed sleeping, whilst also thinking about the bigger picture, grateful for our environment of our world of our apartment in New York and our life together, but also the bigger issues of the current state of politics, and surviving through the ensuing time of economic crises, hoping that Obama and his team could help to drag us out of economic depression, and for the act of painting to give us some catharsis during a time where Andrew was feeling bad and I was doing my best to help him (and myself) through our current situation. Of course, I love Van Gogh, and the paintings of his room, and felt that hopefully this work could also emulate the ultimate love for this room and the hope and aspirations that ultimately it could symbolize; that I hope is brought out in the painting.

This is a picture of Marvin Gaye, an appropriation from the cover of his famous "What’s Going On" record that changed Motown records and made music history as being one of the most politically charged soul albums of all time. The smoky, spiritual sounds of it send me and I was obsessively listening to it while painting the "Archer Prewitt (Montgomery Clift)" painting that was also featured in the show this originated in “Rebel Angels at the End of the World” at QED Gallery in Los Angeles in 2005, and felt compelled to render the cover of Gaye’s masterpiece immediately. This album seemed more relevant than ever in those dour times as we were getting more involved in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and Gaye’s cynical, yet somehow ultimately hopeful view of humanity seems as necessary as ever. He is a transcendent figure, in a way a saint and a true rebel, one of our great artists, murdered by his own father.  It is my hope to be able to make work, that like Gaye’s is able to address the culture outside of the work itself, to make work that is political and conscious of it’s place in contemporary times and also cultural history, but also to have the same work be beautifully formal, and ultimately transcendent beyond immediate context and times and meaning.  Gaye began his amazing career as a Motown soul stylist, helping to forge the sound of that great studio, but as the politics of the time and the singer/songwriter movement grew to create songs of deeper meanings, Gaye fought for the right to make this and subsequent works of great meaning, and while Berry Gordy resisted this creative control, ultimately everyone realized the power of the work and it became one of the touchstone albums of all time.  It’s always important to make work that is “about something”, but also, in a post Post Modern way, to make work that can also be instinctive, melodic, and ultimately sublime in transcendence beyond language.  While painting this, I listened to Gaye obsessively, and tried to capture the spirit of all this while painting the cover of the album, like I used to listen to records as a kid while gazing at the cover, bringing me to another place within the music.

Inspiration

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Portrait of Juan Pareja, by Diego Velasquez, 1650, Metropolitan Museum.

One of my favorite portraits at the Met, and one of my favorite in the world, is this picture at the Met of Juan Pareja.  In fact, the day I found out I was in the Whitney Biennial, I was on the steps of the Met when I received the email, after taking my SVA comics kids on the “kinda like comics” tour of the Met. where we look at narrative works and also seek out the people of color and respectful pictures of women throughout the museum, to give these students (many of whom aren’t regular museum goers) as sense of the history of narrative in art, and also to demystify and give access to art history, which can seem remote to them, for political reasons of class, race, and gender.  I don’t want to make the same mistakes of art history, and want to people my exhibitions of all kinds of communities and histories that make up our world.  The “Sister Wendy” story of this work was that Velasquez was already famous in Spain, but when he wanted commissions while visiting Italy, he had his assistant Juan Pareja hold this painting up and slowly lower it, to show how well he painted and how he was able to capture the proud dignity of the man who carried the work, who was himself an artist, who Velasquez freed from slavery, and whose work he encouraged to leave around the studio to introduce it to patrons and royalty, establishing Area as a renown artist in his own right and lifetime.  I hope to bring proud agency to the people in my painted portraits, especially those like Gaye, who changed culture with his amazing work.

I have always loved Louise Bourgeois and her work.  My second job after college was working the front desk at Robert Miller Gallery, in the late 80’s, when they were uptown on 57th street in the Fuller Building, Cheim and Read were the directors, and they represented Louise.  She would come in with her assistant Jerry Gorovoy, and I would have conversations with them, especially during a time when she was in a Who’s Who directory, which she took very seriously, and I sat down with her (and talked with her on the phone) about the exacting detail of her pages of career.  I was always impressed with her being a great “long distance runner”: I always tell students that to be a great artist, you always have to best the best thing you have ever done, and keep doing this until you get really old and then you can ice cream and die like Louise Bourgeois”! Of course, Louise kept making incredible work all of her life, always challenging herself and what she could do (I’m not sure she ever settled for ice cream!) until she passed away.  Most importantly, for me, she is a great Post Post-modern master, as she made work that was always “about something” (and far more complex than of her famous nightmare of her father eating her, like Saturn eating his young, and/or based on her father’s affair with their maid, which is often what her work is essentialized into being about).  I believe she began each work with a motivational cue, thinking about her family and so on, but then allowed it to be a meditation about this and so many other things.  Coming from surrealism and the great age of psychoanalysis, Freud and Jung, she also had a penchant for the unconscious, and at the same time had incredible formal skills, so the results of her sculptures and images were potent, both in how you could look at them for a long time, but also how you could think about them for a long time, too.  Psychoanalysts would say it was about the father, or psychoanalysis, feminists would say it was about feminism, and so on, and while I don’t think Louise ever intended her work to be about any or all of this specifically, their “noodles would stick on the cabinet” as they would all be right—the work is so rich that it, like all great work, means so many different things to different people and the interpretations hold up as the art itself is so complex and open-ended, but directed in form, content, and attitudinal gesture.

I used to bring my NYU students at the end of their senior year (usually on Easter Sunday!) to Louise’s salons, as a sort of baptism into the artworld.   I felt that if you were in Paris during the latter years of Giacometti, you would visit him with plaster in his hair in his bohemian abode, and Louise’s world was like that for our time.  She was a conduit between modernism and post-modernism, a bridge between the old New York School and now.  She lived in a Chelsea Townhouse on 20th Street, and you could just call her up on the phone and ask her if you could come—she might make you sing her a song (!?) or something, but ultimately would say “come at 3 on Sunday” and hang up.  And sometimes I would also just come on my own.  Her place was old and somewhat disheveled, with yellowing reviews and posters on the bulletin board behind her, with the paint and plaster peeling, but you could tell she was well taken care of—there was never a spec of dust anywhere.  These afternoons were “exquisitely boring” in that they could last for hours—they would finally kick us out at about 7:00 in the evening, and people would become woozy drinking the aperitifs and warm alcohol and soda people would bring (in addition to chocolate, which Louise loved), and one by one you would come up to her little table and present your work to her.  She always had an “Ed McMahon” to her “Johnny Carson”—sometimes it would be famous curators like Robert Storr, sometimes one of her sons, sometimes someone you never heard of, and the “salon” itself was populated by sometimes famous artists, sometimes janitors, sometimes curators and critics wanting to visit with her (she would make them come on Sundays occasionally if they wanted to consort with her).  She sometimes made people cry—although I don’t think she was intentionally ever really “mean”, but could be dismissive if she didn’t “get” the work.  But often she would engage—this was her way I think of continuing to teach, in addition to having contact with the outside creative world, and if she would exclaim “very good!” it would send you to the moon for a week!  I loved having her approval, and would always be pensive and apprehensive in a good, excited way in bringing my work to her (and it was also my way of sharing my work with my students, whom I never discussed my work with usually).  She wanted the others to interact, although we seldom did, in the spirit of a “real salon”, as we were all hanging on her words and reactions.  She was old, but her pilot light was still very much on—you could tell with the twinkle in her eye and her quick wit to respond to things—she really was engaged, although she would barely get to the table, navigating with her hands the counter, etc., to it (I don’t think she wanted people to see her use her walker), and sometimes, like in this picture, her housecoat could be stained and she didn’t always look great, but her bohemian self (I remember seeing her and Jerry at J and R once, in their long black coats, looking like they came from the 19 century in a 21 century technological world).  But I don’t think she cared much—money, etc., didn’t mean much when she finally came into her own (although fame and respect did, I suppose!), and hopefully we don’t have to wait until the 70’s to finally get the recognition we deserve, but sometimes this helps?!  In Louise’s case, I think when she did finally achieve status and wealth, the money didn’t mean much to her, and she just kept challenging herself to make great artworks, which I love too for their psychological meditation and dimension—I think she made work because it was the modus operandi of her life—she was a monk for art and this was her world and way of expressing herself and living, inseparable from her being in her day to day life.  I realized in painting this, a picture from my own photo that I asked her if I could take to paint a portrait from, that the world of her desk is really a cosmology of her work.  From the Hugo Ball poster she designed (which serendipitously was also at the Whitney Biennial, reproduced almost exactly in the same place, if there was a laser beam from its placement to the Semiotexte wall where they put it in the wallpaper design of their installation), to the balls, mirrors, etc., that were reproduced hugely in her sculptures, to the red ink on the table, left over I suppose from her insomnia drawings.  Also, when painting this, I realized her hands on the table resembled her famous marble sculptures with hands on rough surfaces, and her twisted housecoat resembles after the fact of painting it, in my mind, her hanging sculptural effigies. 

After I painted the picture, I sent images of it to her studio, and they mentioned that she saw it and approved, to my great relief.  I first exhibited the work in a show at Derek Eller entitled “Good Leaders, Endangered Species, Ships at Sea” as I felt she was a great leader and model for what a great artist should be, and a later incarnation of the exhibit (called Good Leaders, Endangered Species) that was installed at Broadway Windows, on 8th and Broadway as a part of NYU to the public.  She died during the time of this exhibit, and I hope this ultimately was a respectful homage to this great lady and artist, who in the painting seems to be pointing to the beyond of the door, perhaps symbolizing the afterlife, where she is now immortal through her great works and legacy that will hopefully endure through the ages.  I’m sure, too, that anyone who attended the salons will never forget their experience, being in the realm of this Post Post Modern Master.

Inspiration

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Louise Bourgeois, Welcoming Hands, Paris

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Louise Bourgeois, Tate Museum installation

Alice Neel is one of my favorite painters of all time, and I have always cherished the portrait she did of Warhol, post shooting, that exposed a real tenderness and vulnerability of t his great cool genius.  I was thinking very specifically of this work when I was painting my picture of Louise—I think great portraits bring out the inner personality of the person they are portraying, and hope I was able to do this when painting Bourgeois, in the emulation of how Neel painted Warhol.

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Alice Neel, Andy Warhol, 1970.  Collection of the Whitney Museum.

In 1999, Andrew and I were living in midtown, on 46th between 5th and 6th avenues in a real “no man’s land”, where only tourists resided at night, and during the day businessmen populated the area.  Although there were holes in the ceiling (the contractors would say “why do you want to live here, it’s not Africa!”) our apartment was 1300 square feet for 1300 dollars, and we thought it was a real deal after living in a tiny bohemian apt. on Christopher street for years with the bathtub in the kitchen.  But on the first day after moving in, we were moving furniture for the floor people, and something fell on our poodle puppy, killing her.  We were shocked and devastated, to say the least, and when we came back from the vet., with blood on our clothes, these horrible men on the floor below us beckoned us into their apt. showing us strange velour wallpaper, asking us which kind we liked—it was red velveteen wallpaper, and the men were mobsters who were opening a real bordello underneath us.  Andrew told them frankly that he was teaching at the John Jay School of Criminal Justice—when we asked them what they did, they exclaimed “uh, TRAVEL?!”.  From then on, during the night, they would play demonic disco music, and haggard looking woman would come in, and Andrew fell into a deep depression, as did I, having a “mendacity” moment of the artworld.  Although I was doing well for the time, I felt a Holden Caulfield-like romantic disattachment to the audience of fine art—was I doing all this work just to appeal to “white rich people” and so on, and when we had the opportunity to purchase Andrew’s grandfather’s cabin, in the middle of nowhere in Riverside California, I withdrew all my work from the galleries, thinking I was going to “retire”  (like Rimbaud!) at age 30 from the artworld, and like my heroes Van Gogh and Cezanne, paint in the provinces for myself.  After removing nine tons of garbage from our new place, in Perris California, surrounded by trailers of retirees and crystal meth labs, and living for a year teaching and painting, I realized that if the people at the WalMart knew what we were about we would probably be clubbed, and being in blight (this is near the epicenter of what became the center of the housing crises in California) wasn’t all of what it was cracked up to be.  I came back with my tail between my legs to New York, and forged a place for Andrew and I to live again, and slowly began my prodigal son journey back into the artworld.

Now we love the cabin, which has become our “fortress of solitude” when we can escape there to get a breather from being in the center of everywhere living in New York.  Hopefully we can have the best of both worlds!  We have planted over 200 producing trees on a drip system, and although our place is quite modest, really a shack on a hill, we love it, and although the surrounding area is not much to speak of—there is a highway in place of the 2 lane road that was once there leading up to it, and all the big box stores nearby, it is still secluded enough and once you get used to it, can really be quite beautiful.   I still have a romantic notion of living in the middle of nowhere—we are in an unincorporated area called Meadowbrook, between Lake Elisnore (named after Hamlet!) and Perris (home of all terrain vehicles, a large train museum, and parachuting and hot air balloons, along with an impoverished suburbia), and the poor man’s castles surrounding us, with plots of land with families of goats and people who have ostriches).  The meth labs are still there, but the retirees are friendly, and nature overwhelms all.  I hope that the content of my cabin pictures is just this—two gay men who are married trying to live their domestic life in a cabin on the margins, with the beauty of the landscape transcending the politics.  I love Turner, and hope that the light of the painting emulates the symbolism of everything it can mean, including the spirit of nature.  I also still love Van Gogh and Cezanne, and hope that the nature of the landscape is complex enough that while I’m in the meditation of painting, my unconscious can project onto the map of form, light, and distance, and in micromanaged moments, like the trees of Van Gogh and the rocks of Cezanne, dream worlds can emerge that bring an inner life the surreal joy we find in our escape there, a place that Andrew spent his whole life going to, and what I’m hoping in the future will be our blighted Giverny, where I can grow out my beard real long and paint like Monet the environment and world of our life together.

Inspiration

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Paul Cezanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire , 1895, Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia

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J.M.W. Turner, The Harbor of Dieppe, 182

I have been painting from my own photos for some years now, after years of working from appropriation, using characters and scenes as allegorical avatars for the larger, non-linear narratives I assemble from paintings working like panels in a comic, where the viewer ultimately decides the ultimate narrative what the theme could be about.  I love the Beatles, who a sort of first Post Modern band, spoke through avatars about their real life (they weren’t the Beatles, they were “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” when Paul wrote a song for John Lennon’s first son when he parents were getting divorced it wasn’t “Hey Julian,” but “Hey Jude”).  I also love John and Yoko, post-Beatles, when they wrote and sung songs about themselves, a sort of Post Post-Modernism, because the personal was political, and although autobiographic, the music and the sentiment was so strong it had more “universal value”.  So in painting pictures of my husband Andrew Madrid and I, of our world living in New York and California, I’m hoping the painterly resonance of the pictures appeals to others who can cathect to it’s vision.

I was influenced also in part by T.J. Clark’s “The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers,” where he described how the impressionist wanted to paint scenes of Paris, but not necessarily the aspects the tourists knew, but the gentrified margins that the tourists didn’t see, the real Paris.  In painting from my photos of New York, I want to bring this about, but also to point to aspects tourist might not see behind the verneer.  I love Manet, who was able to turn his personal world into an also political one, that referred to aspects and ideas in the world beyond his canvas, and also bringing an emotive, painterly touch to his brush that also could simultaneously convey emotion and transcendence to his critical mind and ideas.  In painting Times Square, I wanted to expose the buildings and the edifices that the bright world of capital and corporate conglomerate culture almost submerges, to bring about the human, hopefully sublime experience that I still feel when I cross through the bustling universe that seems the center of our globe.  In the movie “They Live” by John Carpenter, its an almost post-Marxist satire on America, where when the working class obtain special glasses, they can see the wealthy are alien robots who control the masses—when with the same sunglasses they look at billboards, the words on the sign say things like “CONSUME” and “BUY”.  At this moment, around Christmas time in Times Square, the HSBC sign flashed “DO” during a sequence, and I appreciated how this could be a theme for our America, but maybe in a good way.  I am inspired by the films and references in the signs here, and we really are about “DO” everyday as New Yorkers to survive and succeed, and as much as this could be a comment on Capitalism, its also an endorsement for the American Dream, in that hopefully its still true that if we try hard, we can achieve our goals, and lift ourselves into a world of freedom and responsibility.  As a son of a psychoanalyst, I have a penchant for the unconscious, and want some of the abstract, unconscious feelings and subconscious iconography spill out along with my conscious brush, and hope that in the lower portion of the painting especially, where humans and cars habitate underneath the signage, that it breaks down into little Broadway Boogie Woogies that are synaesthetic for the excited human agency that populates and hopefully makes even better our world.

Inspiration

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Mondrian, Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1942-43, collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

I have always appreciated the Ashcan school in general, but in particular, George Bellows, who like Monet and his steam engines, portrayed a content-charged landscape of New York by painting it as it “really was” at his time, for timeless pictures that still resonate.

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George Bellows, New York, 1911, collection of the National Gallery, Washington, D.C.

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Joseph Stella, The Brooklyn Bridge, 1939, Whitney Museum

When Andrew and I had our 40th birthday blowout on the occasion of a show I had in Brussels, we traveled to Amsterdam, where there was a Rembrandt/Caravaggio show at Van Gogh museum, which has had an everlasting effect on me. I realized that these masters, like Cézanne, must have set up allegorical scenes that had great meaning for them, and the in micro-managed moments, their unconscious would spill through, allowing for unconsciously realized moments of dream worlds and imagery to emerge, giving surreal life to their paintings. I wanted to micromanage even more because of this, and also to choose deeper mythological themes to ponder while painting. In this show was the famous "The Abduction of Ganymede" painting from 1635, the image of Zeus, in the form of an eagle, taking a baby (who is peeing in fear!) to Mount Olympus to be a water bearer. Like the "Love Triumphant (James Dean in a Tree)" painting in the cosmology installation (an appropriation of an idea of and image from Caravaggio), I chose a photo that emulated the scene, in this case a film still from the Thomas Edison special effect fantasy movie "Rescued from the Eagles Nest" (1907), where a animatronics taxidermy eagle is carrying a real life baby "aloft," the baby’s feet flaying as the eagle bats his wings. I love the Roland Barthes’ essay "The Third Meaning," where he discusses looking at Eisenstein film stills for their first meaning (the description of what you see), the second meaning (the symbolic meaning intended by the artist), and finally, the third meaning (the "vertical" reading—something that has to do with the emotion, the signifier without a specific signified, all the things you may bring to an image that the artist might not have intended, but which tends to give the work a transcendent "life of its’ own for the viewer"). This is so important for me in painting mostly from photos, many of which are from films.

In the great 1936 film "Rembrandt," starring Charles Laughton (who very much resembles Rembrandt), directed by Alexander Korda, there is a great scene of "Rembrandt" painting a picture (after he has exiled himself to "Rembrandt land," post-Nightwatch, after painting people too much how they "really were") where he is painting a picture of a homeless man (the only models he could afford to pose for him) dressed as King Solomon. I’m paraphrasing here, but he homeless guy says "why are you painting me, I’m just a homeless person," and Rembrandt responds "no you are dressed as King Solomon and it means this and this to me, "the vanity of vanities all is just vanities" and so on, and by the end of it, the homeless guy is crying, Tobias, posing with a lute nearby is also moved, and Rembrandt has a tear in his eye. I realized in watching this, that Rembrandt was like a method actor, that he chose allegorical scenes that meant something to him, and while he was negotiating the abstract notions of positive and negative space, form, light, and color, he was thinking about his thoughts of what it meant to him, and somehow in doing so, the real feelings of his real life came spilling into the picture, giving it life. When looking at Rembrandt, who the people may be isn’t as important as the emotions, and I feel that in a Post Post Modern scenario, you can make work that is about something, that its allegorical content can relate to the world, but also, what is so important is that the third meanings, the emotions, the things you can’t put into words can also be described. If oil painting was invented at first in part because it could make tangible and "real" objects and people within the plastic space of the picture plane, couldn’t this also happen with dreams and emotions and subconsciously derived surrealities?

Like the method actor James Dean, who wanted to be on the Mount Olympus of great artists along with Michelangelo and Picasso, I hope to make important art that matters, to be a water bearer too for the gods on Mount Olympus, and it’s a long Sisyphean battle of pushing the boulder up the mountain to do so, but hopefully one day the eagle will born me aloft to greater heights! This was a painting originally in a show called "Kings and Queens" but here hopefully not just represents Zeus, Rembrandt, and art history, but also the idea that hopes and aspirations are the things that keep us going, and also what helped to forge the great country that we can all hope to achieve our "American Dream."

I love Elvis, and despite the politics, feel he really helped to change culture.  Of course he got a lot of his ideas, verve, dancing, and more from growing up in the South and attending gospel performances at African American churches, and also from being inspired by black performers like Little Richard and more.  But he also mixed this with hillbilly and country music, and many different influences (and he hopefully also payed homage to all of these influences then and in later life rather than merely being a colonialist!) and is a complex figure, but also tried his best to be a good person (who gave back generously) of course was one of the major figures to give birth to Rock n’ Roll, changing the world in so doing.  Buddhists believe in the idea of the Manjusri, or teaching Buddha, and feel (I believe!) that Buddhas can also be non-religious, who as extra special people can be teachers that make the world a better place.  Art is about teaching, and I think the greatest of artists help to teach a culture to understand and express itself better.  Elvis certainly did this, and in his incredible music (inspired by James Dean!) helped to give youth a voice and a means of expression in a particularly American way that spread throughout the cultural universe. 

At the birth of his fame, in 1956, no one had seen anything quite like Elvis—in this painting, derived from a black and white photo from one of his first public concerts, the manager in the back with his hand on his mouth is looking quite pensive, as the audience in the high school gymnasium was going WILD and no one had ever seen a performer generate such an incredible display of excited, transformative exaltation before, and quite frankly, it scared him and so many others.   Elvis was religious, however, and I think he might really have felt that he was destined to bring his message and voice to the people, and in painting this, realized that the lights in the background were almost like the “Father and Holy Spirit” and Elvis almost like the “son”, with his mike stand forming a cross with the neck of his guitar.  I also love Warhol, but feel that Warhol might have been on the spectrum of ASD—like people who have Aspergers (and I have had many students on the spectrum!) they can be geniuses, and certainly Warhol was a genius, but aren’t necessarily “touchy feely” people, and have different ways of portraying emotion.  When Warhol painted his Elvis pictures, they were dynamic and great, and like Elvis wanting to be like Dean on the silver screen, painted on silver, made him an iconic avatar, like the religious icons of the past, but in a more emotionally muted tone than when Fra Angelico made his iconic pictures of saints with gilding behind them.  Loving Rembrandt, and the emotions that you synaesthetically feel when looking at his paintings, I think that if you can have the cultural relativity of Warhol, mixed in with the painterly emotions of Rembrandt, maybe you can have something new.  Whereas Warhol flattened in his silk-screens great cultural heroes (in the same manner that in a post-modern paradigm Capitalism can reify agency, or “flatten out, like flour in pizza dough, who we are as people and spirits in the Capitalist machine”) and made them into non-human icons, I want to be able to bring out the REAL people and the REAL emotions that these geniuses generated in their cultural revolutions, to pay homage to them in historical paintings that also exalt the spirit of who they were as cultural creators.  I’m hoping that in this seminal moment captured on film, that I can bring about the energy that was happening in this recorded moment of a time that changed history.

Inspiration

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Andy Warhol, Elvis 1 and Elvis 2, offset lithograph, 1976.

I was hired, after doing a few projects for Interview Magazine, by the then editor Ingrid Sischy to “cover” the Haute Couture fashion shows in Paris in 2008 for turned out to be her last issue of her historic time for the magazine.  I was more than moved and honored, and jumped at the opportunity, despite my feelings towards a “movement” from some years before called “Art and Fashion”.  In the late 90’s, when people were talking about this, I felt it was egregious, that for wealthy people who could buy a Prada coat, they could use the same money to buy a painting, and just like when the coat would go out of style they could throw it away, that they could do the same for the painting.  I felt that art is forever, while fashion was temporary, and art was About Something, had content, whereas fashion was just that—about trends and the temporary, about making something look good without necessarily being about anything.  In doing my research, I realized I was wrong, in part, as the great designers really did work like artists, not only in producing work for shows that happened throughout the years, but also in researching their history (both art and cultural) and making work that WAS about something, that in some cases, could really change history.   And that the paparazzi and fashion photographers were recording these events in magazines for the world—where very few people may have access to Artforum or read or look at it, MANY people looked at and read VOGUE, and if art, in part, was about creating dreams for people and new ideas about thinking, so did fashion, but for the multitudes and not for just a few.  So I got over it!  But it was fascinating, being there, being backstage, and in the beginnings of the recession, when the bubble was about to burst, living on our credit cards in a world of high fashion, spending, and incredibly wealthy people, it reminded me of the artworld, and our bohemian circumstance as artists living in a fortress serving the other half, the one percent of the one percenters.  In doing so, I related to the models—who like Andrew and I, were flying coach, and working their butts off in all of these shows, trying to pull themselves up from their bootstraps with what they had.  Backstage at the Dior show (before John Galliano went crazy, perhaps being wound up in a world that does privileged style sometimes over substance!) I befriended this model from Latvia, who in her broken English, smoking a cigarette in her off time, done up in a wig and sequined makeup, was telling me of her blight coming from her war-torn country to this glamorous tent in the polo grounds of the Bois de Boulogne, in the most exclusive arena of this glamour world.  We really got along, but I forget her name but was able to capture this brief moment were we were relating, her top in high fashion but wearing a simple sweater over a t-shirt as she was waiting to get dressed, telling me her real story before she became a goddess.

Inspiration

I always admired how the Modernists would embrace the circus as an allegorical way of talking about their current culture, by use of the theatrical staging of the circus, where in a carnivalesque manner, all conventions were thrown in the air to see them anew.  Although Degas is politically problematic with his images of women in torqued positions (that he was misogynistic ally “consuming, cannibalizing” as he took in their image that would be painful to hold to then paint it, you still can’t “throw the baby out with the bathwater” and of course they are amazing images, some of which like this one used photography as their source for inspiration.   I think our contemporary world of fashion is like their world of the circus, so much of the politics and fantasies of our time is wrapped up in the pomp and circumstance of these high fashion events.

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Edgar Degas, Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando, 1879, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.

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Calder Circus, 1926-31, Whitney Collection.

I love the painting The Jewish Bride by Rembrandt, one of my favorite paintings of all time in how he was able to capture the love and exaltation in a tender moment in oil paint, in a formal language that transcends any written word.

This is Andrew and I at our cabin home hideaway, in Lake Elsinore, Riverside CA. This is our fortress of solitude where we escape to when we can and where I want to retire and grow out my beard and paint like Monet in a bathetic Giverny. Perris with “e” is our mailing address, and trailers with crystal meth labs and retirees surround us, but we love it and get up every morning to watch the sun rise. This is my “Jewish Bride” is one of my favorite paintings by Rembrandt, but called “Husbands” as we married there the first Sunday we could in CA before the window came down. Luckily the country and the world is getting smarter and love prevails as we just celebrated our 21 anniversary together.

Of course, this is also from a “selfie” (that I first had published on Facebook when I joined!), and I hope that another contemporary context of the painting is that it is obviously a response of me wanting to penetrate to the photo to bring out the emotions and timeless feeling from it, as when we were married we pledged to love each other through eternity.

Inspiration

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Rembrandt, The Jewish Bride, 1665-69, Rijkesmuseum, Amsterdam

I love the Beatles, as I feel they were the first “post Modern band” in that they always spoke through avatars—they weren’t the Beatles, they were “Sgt. Pepper”.  They weren’t depressed; it was Eleanor Rigby, and so on. But I also love John and Yoko, post the Beatles, as they wrote songs and music about themselves, and the words and lyrics were so potent that they resonated beyond them themselves, and other people could relate to their story and have it become theirs.  In many ways, I feel they were the first post post modern band because of this.  I also love Manet, as he would paint about himself and his life, but the personal was political, and he was able to create biographical portraits that extended beyond himself and brought a painterly, warm, emotional politic to the world through his imagery.  “The Death of the Author” by Roland Barthes was particularly influential when I was Semiotics major in the 80’s at Brown, but after the death of Barthes, I feel the author is still important—that it never really goes away when we interpret the works of Van Gogh or Manet or any of the great genius Old Masters.  After creating many images from appropriation after many years, I wanted the autonomy of creating work where I owned the authorship of the entirety of the image, painting from my own photos rather than images culled from other sources that I was using for my avatar-like inspiration.  I feel that when you paint from your life, the love hopefully comes through, which is an emotion that perhaps comes through the brush along with the conscious control better than any other tool or medium in art.   This is an image from our cabin home, in Meadowbrook, California, where we have planted many producing trees in the midst of the cacti and other foliage planted by Andrew’s grandparents that lived there long ago.  This is a scene from when the sun I believe is starting to go down from the day, and my husband is walking down the hill above our humble cabin along with our two poodles Michelangelo and Rosa, and the lens flare is captured in my camera lens, but I want to paint through it like a Turner with his radiant landscapes showing that Nature rules over all, and the buoyancy of the greens of the landscape emulate the best of Van Gogh, when he also embraces his love of nature and the harmony of the world.

Inspiration

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Edouard Manet, The Monet Family In Their Garden At Argenteuil 1874, Metropolitan Museum, New York [INLINE IMAGE: radiantlandscape_clip_image004.png]

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Van Gogh, Two White Butterflies, 1889

I had a dream of painting North America, but that it looked like a puzzle, and realized, after waking up, that Jasper Johns had painted his flag painting from a dream, and although it’s a super smart painting that helped to bring modernism into post-modernity, that it was an idea that was simply generated from his instinctive, dream self, and that you should always follow your dreams when making art—as you subconscious can be as smart as your conscious self.  I realized, after doing research looking for an America that was like my dream image, that Google Earth was the best source for this, and created the painting.  After doing this, and feeling success with the work, I also realized that unlike Johns, who in a Duchamp-way found a “readymade” with his map, and painted the borders and stenciled names of the states in an ab-ex-y way, perhaps making a wry commentary on ab ex and landscape painting, in a knowing, tongue-and-cheek manner that also was allegorically expressive of how we map over reality with language and/or how any means of expression—the “freedom” of the ab ex painters was merely just that—a language.   Although my initial painting was pixilated, I wanted it to be about the nation without borders, the real landscape captured by satellite photos.  I had also painted pictures of the earth—the first picture of the earth—taking analogue, by a human astronaut, and while enjoying this and the effect of looking at this kind of image, it seemed dated, and more seemed possible to bring about the notion of painting a landscape, but unlike in times of the past when we were restricted by what we could experience “en plein aire” or by photography.   For the initial installation “My American Dream”, which I feel is a giant, comic like composition, where each painting acts like a single panel in a comic, juxtaposed with another to created a content and time-rich sequence, I wanted the camera to “pan out” as it were, from my own personal life, and like an epic that has micro-managed “personal narratives” within macro-managed panoramas of world events, wanted to bring in our country and the planet that its on to emulate the global aspects of what “My American Dream” could be about.   So I went back to Google Earth, but this time, panned out farther, and chose the day I was doing this, and the time, so it would be as if I stood outside in space and painted the scene of our world floating in space, and did this on my husband Andrew and I’s anniversary day of Feb. 22, 2012, when we were celebrating our 20th anniversary of being together!  It was fun painting all the micromanaged moments in the work, and remembered the feeling of watching the opening scenes of “The Big Blue Marble” that showed the Earth as it really was, generating a sublime feeling even as a youngster, that we were really all like hamsters running around on this rock we call Earth, and we think we know what we know but how much do we really know about everything.  When it comes to gender identity politics, certainly it becomes true that we are all merely animals that use language and the proceeding ideological ideas of politics to subjugate and partition different groups and different peoples.  I do feel that the earth is a living thing, like a giant whale in space and we are merely barnacles clinging to its surface—if we could all learn to respect one another and the planet that we are living on hopefully we can all come together an make the world a better place where we can all survive happily and healthfully into the future!

Inspiration

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Jasper Johns, ‘Map’, 1961, MoMA

Finally, one of the last images in the installation (if you are looking left to right) there is this picture of my family, looking towards the painting of me and Andrew–my future for this 4 year old version of myself–and like Bedknobs and Broomsticks, the whole scene of the installation. Like in Pinocchio, who becomes a real boy after discovering his love for others and his family, I created this for my Dad on his 80th Birthday, to celebrate he and my mom’s love for me and my sister in this picture they gave us for Christmas a couple of years ago, in a photo taken by Deborah my cousin in the fall of 1970.  She was living with us at the time, and our great grandmother, who loved TV, gave us a new color television as couldn’t stand our old black and white one.  My father had made my sister a flat dollhouse that she didn’t use anymore, so he flipped it over and put a piece of carpet over it to make a TV stand for it, and directed Deborah to take this photo of us, “testing” our new TV for the first time.   While painting, I listen to music to get my head into the picture that I’m creating, and for this I listened to much of my parent’s old record collection (on cd!), and realized that when I was painting to West Side Story and the Sound of Music, it worked the best, so I think we must have been watching one of these two movies!  I love Gustav Klimnt, and how he used design elements partly inspired by East Asian miniatures to carry the synaesthetic, emotive life of the figures they embrace, and hope that the love that my family feels for one another, both then and now is captured by the bedspread.  My mom is tickling my sister to get her to laugh, as I’m contemplating the tv as I do when I paint, and subconsciously think I painted my Dad emphasizing his pointing to his ring as truly this painting is about family, and the nostalgic moment we used to have as a country, where television was a gathering place for the family, a new hearth, where we all shared moments together.  In the uber installation at the Whitney, I hope we are also watching the other paintings in the show, how other families (like Martin Luther King’s playing piano), scenes, and events help to forge the country where my husband and I can also be a family, and all of us happy and loving looking into the future of our lives.

Inspiration

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Gustav Klimt, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, 1907, Neue Galerie, NY

I had a show in Brussels during the time of our 40th birthdays, and we had a “40th Birthday Blowout” (that we are still paying for!) by traveling also to Amsterdam and Paris, where we stayed for a magical couple of days in the Proust Room of the Ritz Hotel.  Proust would have his dinners supposedly in this small room above the restaurant, where he would also meet guests and hold soirees. We were enchanted by the place and its history, and Proust has long been important to us in his life and literature (I have created paintings of him and other works from this time, also in the Whitney installation).  Proust’s famous Madeline’s were talismans back to synaesthetic memories that he so eloquently and geniusly wrote about in his experimental, non-linear narrative (that I hope the installation emulates), and his spirit seemed very alive in the context of the room itself.  They had beautiful flowers in this elegantly appointed small single (but luxurious) room, and we spent much time there, ordering in Spaghetti Bolognese (that we shared) for our meals, etc.  In our Ritz bathrobes, we chillaxed in luxury, and literally stopped and smelt the flowers, appreciating our life and feeling deep gratitude to what brought us to this point of our 40th birthdays. 

I painted this work a couple of years later, when Andrew was extremely ill, trying to remember this high point in our life, and also painting this for my love for my husband, after being together for over twenty years.  I also wanted to paint this for him, when he was able to get out of bed, so he could remember happy times in the hope that it would make him feel better.  Sometimes the eloquencey of pithy epiphanies can be really true—stopping and smelling the roses of life is so important, and I choose paintings to meditate upon the subjects, like Proust’s Madeline’s, which are most important for me, and in many cases, make me feel good while painting them.  Sometimes I think what you bring to the subject matter might be as important as the subject matter itself, especially true in painting, where thoughts and feelings unconsciously slip out as your brush is trying to consciously control the image.  I’m hoping my love for Andrew and our life together is infused in this self reflexive moment—usually in movies when you have a scene with a mirror it is about self contemplation—and of course the mirror here emulates Andrew in his action, it’s also me looking into the mirror of our world together and everything that it means to me.   Andrew is an artist, too, and we both love Van Gogh and Gauguin—narcissistically I think sometimes we could be reincarnations of this homosocial couple, and here hopefully the symbolic associations of color, etc., come out in this portrait of my husband, who I think looks a bit like a much more handsome version of Paul Gauguin!

Inspiration

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Paul Gauguin, Self-Portrait with Portrait of Bernard, 1888, Van Gogh Museum

After I took the photo of Andrew which is next to this picture in the Whitney installation, I handed the camera to him and he took this picture of me, standing in front of a reproduction of a portrait of Proust (the original hangs in the Musee D’Orsay).   This was an incredible (but small one bedroom) room above the restaurant at the Ritz, where Proust supposedly had his meals brought up to him in his private soirees.  Like Proust, and his famous Madeline’s, all the images I paint from are talismans to memories and the feelings that they conjure, that, also like Proust, I string together in non-linear narratives of my installations.  So truly he is one of my heroes—it goes without saying that he was also queer and “queerified” the notions of what narrative could mean, in addition to speaking allegorically about the politics and society of his times, as I would also like to do, and although I don’t think of myself as a “dandy”, think there is something transcendent about the ability of the “Bricoleur” to walk through culture as an active bystander, being able to have the artistic sense of remove to really comment upon and “see” the world as perhaps it “really is”.   While painting this (as I have done with previous portraits of Proust) I listened to an (abridged—but still over 60 cds!) of an audiobook of “Remembrance of Things Past” and tried my best to concentrate upon it and really understand what was being said, whilst also interpreting it—my “left brain” was so occupied by this, my “right brain” could really concentrate on the nuance of form and light and color, and it was surprisingly relatively easy to paint, although it seemed as if the ghost of Proust was speaking into my ear, both from the painting and the reflection in the painting!  I always enjoy painting aspects of photography as if they were real, and the light in the photo, and the red in my irises seemed to get through to the idea that I was painting as if looking in a mirror at my inner self.  When you see people looking in mirrors in movies it usually has something to do with self-reflexivity, and in painting this, like any self portrait that hopefully is good, I was painting also aware of my self, and my past, and what notions constitute the self as self-instituting, and how, like they say in Buddhism, this is impossible, that interdependence, the balancing of identities based on memories, environment, our interactions within the world, so richly brought out in narratives such as Proust’s life work, can create a sublime feeling of the objectification of oneself as merely a being within the world.

Inspiration

I love this Chardin self portrait from the Louvre, and the painterly way he uses pastel in micro-managed ways like I now try to paint… And he seems in this an effete dandy, whilst at the same time masculine and strong, and one of the best painters of domestic (and symbolically political) life, and looked specifically at this portrait while painting this work.

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Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Self portrait wearing Glasses, 1775, Louvre

This is an appropriation from a Currier and Ives Print of the same title, of one of the fastest ships of their time that went through a terrible storm and famously survived, to become one of the most famous ships in the world.   This originally was in a show called “Good Leaders, Endangered Species, Ships at Sea”, because, on the ebb of the W era, I felt like we needed Good Leaders, because they were like an Endangered Species, in a World that was like a Ship lost at Sea.   Luckily Obama became President, and I felt we were a little less lost at that point, but at the time, the ship seemed like America, strong and powerful, but without a great captain to guide us through the impending doom of the economic recession, and our discursive relationships with the other powers of the world that threatened us.  But like this ship that made it, I felt that America would make it, and will continue to be one of the great countries of our moment and of history.  Also maritime pictures are I think so popular as they are about freedom, of the boat becoming a proxy for the person who is looking at it, and it takes you on a journey to another place.  One of my favorite paintings is the sailboat picture behind the couch at the beginning of the Simpsons, and I feel that it emulates that if you feel like your are stuck in the cul-de-sac suburbia of your Springfield, like the Simpsons, who might look at that painting as a symbol of freedom and escape, that looking at art can also be a talisman for transcendent journeys.  After I painted this I was astonished to see that ironically, this image also makes an appearance in a horror movie staring John Cusak and Samuel L. Jackson called 1408 in a hotel room that becomes haunted in a surreal way, and they show the sailboat painting in the room changed to this—like the stretched paintings by Disney animator Mac Davis in the Haunted Mansion ride at Disneyland!   But the original Currier and Ives print I believe was about the hope for America to survive all storms like the power of the boat, and allegorically for me, if the boat could be like a person, that we can survive the trials of our life and come out the stronger for them, and perhaps still win at the end of the day!  It was also interesting to make a painted image from a print, bringing out the colors of what could be a two-dimensional printed image into a three dimensional oil painted plastic world, that also hopefully carries with it the depth and dimension of myself, as I painted fervently through the work to help my own self into a better world of a more exalted plane through the act of painting it.

Inspiration

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Currier & Ives: Clipper Ship "Comet" of New York, 1852

This is the first painting I created in graduate school, at the University of California, Irvine, in the early ‘90’s.  Based on a drawing I had created the summer before coming to school, while I was living in a basement in Brooklyn, it is of Ty Cashe, a barely-known porn star, who was in one of the first gay porn magazines I have ever bought (and seen!) in college.  Narcissistically, I thought it looked a bit like me from when I was younger, and we were about the same age, so he was like an avatar that existed in a non-subjugated world where it was perfectly okay to be gay and to act out on your desires.  Engraved in the wax of the surface of the painting, however, I used a nail and a stencil to painstakingly write “Suddenly it occurred to me this is my life to me to me” over and over again. 

At the time, being a Semiotics major at Brown, I was deeply invested in the idea of language being like the software that operates the notions (and ideologies) of how we perceive the world in the hard drive of our brains.  Homosexuality didn’t exist before the late 1800’s when a Belgium scientist “discovered” that word—of course there have been same sex relationships since the beginning of human kind and nature, but not since we had that word would we have the specific subjugations that come about using the power and ideas generated from the specificity of language mapping over the reality of how things exist within the world.

Many of my Semiotics friends became Buddhists, in that Buddhism is the ancient philosophy that, much like Semiotics, shows that we and the world exists, but perhaps not in the manner that we perceive it, and I remember asking one of my Semiotics professors at Brown, in a nihilistic moment, that if “it all adds up to zero” what was the point, and he retorted that “well, it’s interesting to talk about”!  Most great art I believe exposes the play between signifier and signified in the semiotic sign, and hear I was really trying to express how beings like the boy in the image exist within the world, but suddenly, when they find out their Lacanian place within the Symbolic Order, all sorts of ideological ideas can come upon them. 

I had always been attracted to other males, but felt “different” than the gay people I saw portrayed in television (such as John Ritter in Three’s Company, although he was supposed to be a straight character performing as a gay one!), and didn’t want to be the “fag” that was beat up on the playground.  In the original incarnation that this work appeared, it was alongside other portraits of three other pornstars/hustlers, against the different elements (fire, water, earth), with texts from a play I had written (I come from a playwriting/theater/comics background) and a video, in a show entitled “Not”.  I was interested in how many teens that commit suicide did (and perhaps sill do) so when they find out they are lesbian or gay—when they find out they are this word that has so many negative connotations that seem so different from how they originally identified (and felt) about themselves.  Thankfully, our world has much progressed since even the early ‘90’s, with cultural and political revolutions, the ability of people to survive with HIV, and with shows like Glee and more, super positive LGBT characters live in our entertainment culture that have inspired a younger generation—and the world in general—to have a much more positive respect for people of all persuasions—but of course some of these issues naggingly persist.  In the current incarnation of this painting in this installation of “My American Dream”, I hope that it has a much more positive feeling—that this is a boy, and iconic avatar personally for myself—looking into the future of his life with the knowing that it will all turn out wonderfully in the end, that he will be able to get married, be happy with his husband and with his family in an America that has grown and matured, thanks to history of cultural revolutions that have proceeded and persist, to make a world that people can live with empathy and compassion and respect for one another and the world.  Like the boat next to him in the installation, which could be his toy boat but in that image one of the strongest, fastest ships in America that survived horrible storms, that despite the anguish he might be currently feeling, that he could ultimately, romantically survive into a 21 century America that is a better place. 

Ty Cashe evidently DID survive the age of HIV related deaths, and is still around somewhere in the Bay Area, and it was incredibly moving and vindicating that, after 14 years, hopefully this painting still holds up, that my 47 year old self carried this picture I created when I was just 25 years old through the lobby of the Whitney Museum to hang on the wall the installation that wasn’t just a non-linear narrative entitled “My American Dream” but actually performing this—that when I painted the picture I hoped to be in the Whitney Biennial, and this was my dream come true.

Inspiration

I read the famous book by Robert Henri “The Art Spirit” when I was in college, and it always stuck with me as being true—the warmth and human emotion and trying to capture the “spirit” of the subject was a driving force for me, even when in Graduate School as a child of the Pictures Generation school of appropriation.  If I could appropriate images, painting from photography (in this case, also not objectifying the subject in the way that I was taught Degas would—he was already objectified in the film and photos of porn), I could project my feelings of empathy and relate to the subject, and also hope that I could capture his spirit in doing so, that ultimately would give the work a “life of its own” beyond any intended meaning on my behalf.

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Robert Henri, Laughing Child, 1907, Whitney Museum