I love Montgomery Clift, who was the idol of James Dean and Marlon Brando. Like them he was queer and lived the life of a gay man out in the open in his Hollywood and NYC circles. Here he plays Prewitt in From Here to Eternity (1953), a soldier who is also a boxer, who no longer wants to box after blinding a friend. Although a career soldier, he is also a bit of an artist, the music he plays with his trumpet makes all pause with tears in their eyes. Although ultimately a tragedy, Clift plays a rebel, an almost saint, who follows his North Star and puts up with the abuse of the world around him who wants him to conform—to box, to play his role even it might not be what ultimately is right, and Prewitt refuses, with stoic reserve and quiet power.

Clift was like this in his own life, very choosey with his roles and decidedly independent—he was the first to defy the studio system of ownership, striking out on his own he helped to release the slave-like domination a studio could have over their contract players. He was raised by his dilettante mother in an aristocratic manner, traveling the world and in private schools, even when his family couldn’t afford it. He was gay but didn’t compromise too much in his private life to become the straight man that society wanted and had his lovers and affairs. He put this all into his emotive work, the sensitive white guy that defied the phallocentric patriarchal order that he was born into—sometimes in subversive ways as a bad guy, like A Place in the Sun, but sometimes like archetypal heroes that sacrifice for the greater good, like in Eternity, and he played that role in real life.

The car wreck that changed his world also changed his face, his primary emotive tool, and after Elizabeth Taylor saved him, could only move really one side of his face, his “right profile” like the great Clash song that introduced me to him. Given to drugs and drink to squelch the pain both in his body and his life and career, Clift kept striving onward, still making some great movies and works before his bitter end.

For this painting, I was listening to the amazing album What’s Going On, by Marvin Gaye. The war in Iraq was raging, with W. as president and all the mendacity that went along with it, and it was all I could do but paint my heart away the way Prewitt would his trumpet. I want my works to break into surreal other worlds—I love Cézanne, and how in his images he projects his unconscious onto the map of what he is perceiving, and the subliminal space comes through. Here, like in a Cézanne or indeed how Gaye’s music—so compelling and in that classic album, about the politics of his day but transcending into musical ethereal space. I’m hoping this comes through in this work—what I was channeling being despondent about war and government, but also our personal life—my husband’s best friend Alicia had just died of AIDS-related causes and we were mourning her loss—comes through. The show was Rebel Angels at the End of the World, and I would like to think that Clift here is almost like a rebel angel, “wings” sub-consciously appear in the background, and like the actor who fell from heaven to enlighten the planet, I’m hoping the music of my brush will bring some respite to our world.