This was for the first installment of Good Leaders, Endangered Species, Ships at Sea, at Lightbox gallery in Los Angeles in the spring of 2008. I hoped, with the campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama (along with John McCain!), that the poetry of the narrative allegory would resonate in that intense political climate, we needed “Good Leaders,” as they were like an “Endangered Species,” in a world and America that was a “Ship at Sea.”

James Dean has always been a hero for me. A gay man (or at the very least “Hollywood bisexual”!) Dean was sugar-daddied up on his way to fame—his many homosocial and homoerotic encounters and “friendships” are well documented and true. A great artist, Dean wanted to be a master, and be on the Mount Olympus of culture with Picasso and Michelangelo and more. He strove mightily, a true “hero’s journey,” as his mother died young, he was cast off by his hapless father to live with his cousins in Indiana, but knowing he didn’t fit in, worked intensely to get out—to Southern California to eventually go to UCLA for acting. This lasted a short while, as he began to get successful bit acting jobs, and on the recommendations (and connections) of his older male producing boyfriend, came to NYC, started acting in theater, Elia Kazan “discovered” him for East of Eden (which I believe the original photo is an outtake from), and the rest is history. In just a couple of years and three movies, James Dean changed culture, bringing his sensitivity and Method Acting ways to his roles, he was able to suture into his characters his own life spirit, a queer man who loved life, and like his hero The Little Prince, bringing about a new awareness of what it was like to be young, smart, confident yet questioning—also like Hamlet—to “wake” people from the everyday life of the super conservative ’50s to a new world.

Elvis was inspired by Dean, as was most of rock ‘n’ roll and the beginnings of the beatniks, hippies, and boomer generation. I don’t think I would be the same person without him and his influence, and I love trying to channel him, bringing my own life into his character like he did in his acting.  Sometimes when I’m painting figures who have passed away, I feel in my latest night moments as if I’m like a medium, bringing into being a consciousness into the persona I’m portraying, and their essence comes through. The background here was flowers, but from a low angle with a high perspective, like the Japanese prints Van Gogh and Gauguin loved that inspired them to have high horizon lines (or none!) in their works.

The same is happening here, but also inspired by Shojo manga (Japanese comics for girls, that have emotive symbolic backgrounds behind characters to emulate aesthetically their emotions, also like the prints that came before them), I hope the flowers convey a synesthetic feeling. More than this, as I paint from material that may be out of focus in the original image (and in this case, from a black-and-white photo), how it’s not like the photo is what is “me” about it. in the abstraction of the out of focus imagery, I hope that by painting the distortions as if they are real, that my unconscious also spills out into my brush. If oil painting was created to make things look more “real” than any other medium, perhaps it can create dream space/time from our inner minds that also feels palatable and real. Not that I’m any medium, but if I’m channeling these characters, when their essence comes through, hypothetically maybe I could also paint a portal into the world from which the consciousness apparated from—in this case heaven? The Mount Olympus of James Dean’s dreams?

Whatever the case may be, like the watch face on his wrist, we are only on this mortal coil for a short while in the eons of existence, and better make the most out of what we have been given while our consciousness has the vehicles of our bodies in which to operate. James Dean did well with his very short time on Earth before he died at age twenty-four, I can only hope that I’ve been working as hard as I can and trying my very best to make art that might be able to tell stories for a culture to understand itself in order to progress (and teaching, and loving my husband, family, and friends, too!). Having Dean as an ultimate icon and idol (I’m working on his biography as a graphic novel to be published by Fantagraphics one day soon—and this image will be part of it!), I hope to make great art that will stand the test of time, with my spirit in the vehicle of the painting to speak positively to future worlds—perhaps like the flowers in the painting this is a romantic notion, but as Dean says in Rebel Without a Cause as his character Jett Rink, “You gotta do something. Don’t you?”