My husband and I love Amsterdam, and I dearly love Elvis, so this image in a way is the best of both worlds, but also bittersweet, as this photo was taken near the Anne Frank House in that historical city. For our fortieth birthday blowout, I had a show in Brussels, and Andrew and I did our version of the “Grand Tour,” including staying blissfully in Amsterdam, also home of two of our favorite museums, the Rijksmuseum and Van Gogh. As we were walking through the streets on the way to the Anne Frank House, I spotted a framed photo of Elvis, from his famous ’68 Comeback Special, where he had the sit-down acoustic session with his original band members, wearing the leather outfit that became so iconic. I wanted the photo, but Andrew said no, so I took this photo instead, with the double reflection of me holding up my camera phone, with Amsterdam in the background and the image of Elvis in the front.

This is one of the first paintings I exhibited from my own photography—I was weaning myself away from appropriation, wanting to “own” the entirety of the image, and have my personal life be hopefully allegorical for greater things. I love painting reflections and distortions from photos as if they are “real”—I think that reflections and shadows sometimes reveal a “soul” to the conscious goings-on in an image, and as my conscious mind is describing what it sees, my “left brain” can’t totally understand the abstracted and deconstructed images of reflections and shadows, etc., and perhaps, like Cézanne projecting onto a landscape that breaks into abstraction, this might happen when I paint abstracted images of otherwise contained and conscious imagery.

Elvis was a “fat joke” when I was a kid growing up in the ’70s; when he died, I was more interested in Bowie than Elvis. I took him for g ranted for years, but when I finally saw the comeback special (officially called just Elvis), it was a revelation. Here was one man—who building on all the soul music and rock ‘n’ roll—albeit begat by mostly the great African American musicians before him (that he was friends with and that he acknowledged, still important to recognize the colonization by white people and producers of this history), along with hillbilly music, “changed culture.” The story goes that Elvis had “sold out,” Colonel Tom Parker, his famous man-ager, and the entertainment industry had “neutralized” Elvis after he came back from the Army, and instead of touring, they had him on an endless cycle of B movies that made a lot of money for the studios and for Elvis, but had little effect on the culture that he helped to erupt from his early sublime Sun Studios and RCA recordings and amazing performances on The Ed Sullivan Show and the like. The producer of the special loved Elvis, however, and to have him become “woke,” took him after a meeting along a walk on Sunset Boulevard, and Elvis was unnerved that few people recognized him or cared. He allowed the producer to bring out the best of him (instead of the sanitized Christmas special the Colonel had hoped for), and for the first time in years Elvis rocked, going back to his roots, with the highlight being the sit-down acoustic section where he performed with his original Sun Studios group (that inspired the MTV acoustic sessions and so much more).

Being in Amsterdam, totally out of location for Elvis, and ourselves, near Anne Frank, this became almost like a memento mori still life, instead of skulls, a reminder of mortality, and the fleetingness of fame. Anne Frank was so amazing as a young woman writing about the plight of her family and all the Jews and peoples that were being murdered in the Holocaust, and she wanted to be a great writer to tell people of their plight—and this, as tragic as it was, became performative, as truly she was exactly what she wanted to be, and generations of people have been so moved and influenced by her and her writing. Elvis, as dichotomous as this may seem to bring up in the same conversation, also was a great spirit who wanted to move the world with his art and make it a better place, as he did. I hope in my work to be able to tell stories for a culture to under-stand itself for it to progress, and although life is fleeting, am doing my best in my art, life, and teaching to bring to the world all I can to enlighten and inspire. As the image here falls into surreal abstraction, I hope the soul of all we do and can accomplish opens up into a dreamscape, although melancholic, of optimistic hope of art to translate across the globe in a universal hope to transcend into a wonderous future.