From 2005 when I first painted this picture:

This is from an image from the original crash site, painted on the 50th anniversary of the James Dean’s death… I wasn’t thinking of this however when I was painting it, it was from a James Dean book (James Dean: American Icon, with the photos archived by David Loehr, owner of the James Dean Museum, that I have subsequently become friendly with) that is I felt compelled in the middle of the movie “Room With A View” that I was watching one summer day when I was at Brown to run out to the bookstore and get…

Obviously this relates to Andy Warhol disaster series… If painting is like punk rock, which is essentially about "killing your father" to do something new, Warhol is the father to kill in order for art to progress into the 21 century…. After all is said and done, I really believe that Warhol was a pock-marked gay poor kid from Pittsburgh who really wanted to BE Marilyn Monroe, and that his work was saturated with the pathos of the agency being reified into commodity culture, and his work is exemplary of a culture spinning out of control, and talked about it in a spiritual way… However, this isn’t how his work was considered in his time, and the "slip-shod" way of his "non-hand" silk-screening a painting surface was all about HIM killing the fathers of abstract-expressionism, and perhaps Picasso and all that came before…

But what if Warhol painted like Rembrandt? Or Van Gogh? Or Velasquez? With all of the ideology (modernist? or what came to be considered the ideology of modernism–i.e. its not the subject matter that was important, but what you bring to the subject matter that is important? The mind of the artist, the subconscious, the transcendent and perhaps SUBLIME affects of painting?)…

I think that post-modernism has opened up so many doors and windows considering the politics that surround art and the language in which we interpret it, that the time for painting being able to be PAINTING while at the same time smart and true to the culture in which it is brought out in is possible…

While painting this I was thinking how his car crash is emblematic of a culture that is currently embracing cars, oil, technology and so on in such a manner as to disregard where it is leading us…. James Dean is the humanistic sincerity of all of us caught up in a system that doesn’t care, that will ultimately serve to destroy the people that help to drive it… I love Van Gogh, but wasn’t thinking consciously of him or his work when I was doing this; it just came out that way… I love looking at the space in modernist (and premodern) paintings in the subconscious pockets of plastic space that appear in the negative space between things, think that the artist was able to have their inner mind (or eye, or spirituality) spill out into the works, giving it the alchemy of life. There are many wild pockets of activity in this painting, and I have spent hours gazing into it, interpreting it… I feel that James Dean is in the back car seat, and saw in the photo what I took to be Christ or an angel lifting him up… I’m not a religious person, but a spiritual one, and found that unlike many of the other posed photos I appropriate, this real life scene was saturated with Third Meanings that gave it such a life that it seemed like a recording of an otherworldly event… Whether or not this is true, certainly when painting it I felt driven and inspired as my subconscious took over, describing the death of one of Americas great iconographic actors that came to an untimely end, surrounded by the patriarchal-like figures of his mechanic (who miraculously?) was thrown to safety, and those who happened (?) to be at the scene to help to pick up the pieces…

Inspiration

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Andy Warhol, Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster), 1963

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Van Gogh, Harvest at la Crau With Montmajour in the Background 1888