This is an image from the film Giant, where James Dean plays Jett Rink, a ranch hand on the character played by Rock Hudson, Jordan “Bick” Benedict Jr., a wealthy Texas rancher who brings home a new wife from the East Coast, played with power by Elizabeth Taylor as Leslie Lynnton. It’s the mid-’20s Texas, and Bick is in love with his cattle and their ranch history, while his neighbors are striking it rich with black gold—the oil that is pervasive in their world. Jett inherits a small plot of land from Bick’s sister Leslie (who is kind of a lesbian, a lone wolf of a woman who resents Leslie as the new woman of the house and dies abusing her horse who takes off on her). Jett is sure there is oil in his property, and relentlessly tries to bring him-self up both in society and in his land, loving Leslie from afar and being supremely jealous of Bick. When he does and comes to Bick covered in oil and slugs him—success is the best revenge—although he takes over Texas as a millionaire, opening hotels and taking over more land, he becomes more sadly pathetic—careful about what you wish for. The last scene featuring Dean is infamously called the “Last Supper” as his character, realizing all he has won, but how this doesn’t help his heart of what he really longs for—acceptance and being a better man (and Leslie’s daughter) after a drunken rage poisoning the party of all the kinfolk at the hotel, he passes out. George Stevens, the tenacious director of the film, hated Dean, and resented his rebel attitude, but in a method-acting way, brought out the best in his acting (as Dean also resented the director), and after the final scene was filmed with Dean, he flew back to California, got his new Porsche, and died in a traffic accident en route to a race (he wasn’t allowed to race for safety and insurance reasons while filming). A tragic end to an actor that changed the world, but an amazing film that came out after his death.

During this time when I was painting, W. was in office, and we were getting going into what turned out to be America’s longest—and in some ways most bathetic and sad—war. I was listening to Air America at the time, when there were pro-tests outside of Bush’s ranch in Texas, and worried about the direction that the USA was taking. At some points, rebels and punk rockers slide into a far-right-like feeling—as they go against the system, and strike out on their own, thinking about it from another perspective, especially if they are phallocentric and patriarchal too, they aren’t too far away from W., or Trump in our era. I think a little of George Bush entered the persona of Jett Rink in this painting perhaps. When I paint, I am like a method actor, listening to music and films and audiobooks that somehow have something to do with my subject matter. Here I was listening to all this—but the news and the war, too. I hope that my apprehension appears here, but also the beauty of America and Texas and possibility—my love for oil paint is like Jett Rink’s love for oil, hopefully it brings me to a better place than he, and painting is my spirit and my heart in my world and my art.