Part of me wanted to start painting these Judy Garland paintings because it was one of those things where a lot of older gay men love Judy when a lot of younger gay men, or younger people in general, are terrified of her or don’t know who she is or something… When a reporter does a story about a cult and then becomes a member I sort of became a member in just finding what it was about Judy Garland that used to appeal to everybody. By painting her it was terrifying…

She had such a sorted life… She was such an empowered person, and really incredibly talented… You see any movie of her, she completely just glows right off the screen, and she’s fantastic. You know, she would make comeback after comeback after comeback…

Everything is allegorical. I am using these people as vehicles to talk about different ideas that I have. The was the theme of the show I initially painted this work was for a show called "Heroes," and for me Judy Garland is a hero…

Post-Modernism, I think if I could put it into a nutshell, it’s about agency being reified into Capital … It’s like agency, our spirit, our soul, our position as individuals reified—like flour into pizza dough, being folded into Capital… I feel we live in a Corporate Commodity Culture now where a lot of our ideas are decided and contained by committee. Somebody like Judy Garland or Elvis, who is almost like the brother of Judy Garland, in a way, were these people had incredible talent, were incredibly skilled…

I’m talking about the past in order to hopefully forge a place for the future…I always think that (I teach a lot and I love it ) and I feel it’s the job of an artist in a way to be a teacher, and I feel like these were people who were these living entities that were true geniuses that were able to be within the popular culture, and that, you know, there was a reason for them being there…

Joseph Campbell’s idea of an artist was that artist was supposed to tell stories for a culture to understand itself in order to progress… I feel that these people were like that, they were artists who were really trying to do something, but to do it within a popular vein, in order to reach the most amount of people. To move them, to have them experience something, to maybe have them think about their life a little better, to think about the world in which we live. And yet, the tragedy… So much about being a hero is about the giving over of oneself, in a way… I don’t think you have to suffer to be a good artist, I don’t think that, but…
(excerpted from a interview with Ross Bleckner in 2006 for show catalog)