I made this painting in our super-illegal sublet in SoHo, when I was paving my way back into the art world after dropping out and coming back to NYC to mend over old ways and find my way back again. I love James Dean for all the reasons I have written about elsewhere here, and always found this photo, an outtake from when he was working on Giant, super sexy and alluring. He was so cool, and “did it his way,” and through his genius, and his queerdom, changed the art of acting and culture. He was sugar-daddied into Hollywood by older gay and closeted men, but by this time, when he was only twenty-three or twenty- four, had already made it, working with the biggest names in Hollywood, on the set with Rock Hudson and his great friend Elizabeth Taylor, and defying, but making great work with George Stevens, the director of Giant. I’m very influenced by method acting and try myself to connect with the material/characters I am painting, superimposing my own life and self with the characters I’m portraying, learning as much about them as possible to put myself into it as much as possible. Warhol had, in my mind, flattened out his icons to be the postage stamp they were made into by capitalist culture, I’ve always wanted to bring them out into the flesh, to honor them for who they were as people, and in this case, cultural icons that made history.

I’ve also “employed” these icons as characters in my own nonlinear narratives. Hamlet 1999 was loosely based on the sci-fi homoerotic screenplay I wrote in exile, and Dean here for me was Hamlet (as was Keanu, and more). Shakespeare ’s Hamlet was always questioning authority, not sure how to make the right move to impossibly right the wrongs of patriarchy, Dean too was in the same position in real life, the perfect avatar for his character—and mine at this time in my life. I was in my thirties, and filling up our tiny apartment (with shower in the kitchen), painting literally in a closet, creating a salon-style arrangement around the whole apartment that acted like a storyboard for my narrative, that I brought entirely to the Derek Eller Gallery when it too was tiny, filling up every square inch of space, including over the door, with my works to tell this story. This painting was near the entrance/beginning of the narrative, as here Dean as Hamlet looks like he is finishing his cigarette, about to launch into his role, as I was taking a breath from the art world, about to plunge back in, devil be damned and going gung-ho into my future as an artist.