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

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

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

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