I am pleased and proud to have created this painting for Art Basel 2024, my first time exhibiting there, and wanted
to make something special that fit the region and influence. I have been making appropriations from comics my
whole life, and had previously created a series of Tintin works for when I was exhibiting with Alain Noirhomme
gallery (now Maruani Mercier) in Brussels. This image is from the first panel in the “experimental” Tintin album
The Castafiore Emerald, first published in 1962, the twenty-first volume of the Tintin series. The book was
experimental as it was the first time that Tintin and his companion Captain Haddock didn’t travel anywhere to
solve their caper mystery, but stayed at home, at Marlinspke Hall, Hoddock’s estate. In the caper, the opera diva
Bianca Castafiore has her beloved emerald jewelry stolen, only to be found in the end by Tintin in a magpie’s nest.
Symbolically, some people believe that this book was helpful for Europe (and Hergé!) to re-discover their souls
after the horrors of World War II—home is where the heart is, and the emerald was found right on their own
property (I made a painting of the scene of Tintin’s discovery that was featured in the Whitney 2014 Biannual).
For this painting, I blew up the panel on large photo paper to render and really study it. I had several volumes of
the album (it was the first Tintin I had ever read—I still have the cheap volume I got when I was on my high school
journey to stay with a family and travel with the school to France and Switzerland), and chose the slightly better
Little Brown version, that had better paper, therefore better color reproduction, but slightly off-register colors.
For me, how its not like the original is what is “me” about the appropriation—I don’t want my appropriation works
to look exactly like the source reference, and want to bring a warm, painterly expression to convey synesthetically
how I feel about the work, in this case, as if I could translate my feelings from when I first read the comic as a
young teenager.

Tintin is famously pretty gay—he lives in almost a completely homo-social world (Castafiore is bittersweetly one of
the only female prominent characters in the series, although she is like a flamboyant drag queen!), and he lives
with a “daddy” like character, Haddock, in his mansion. Although Hergé himself was a bit of a philanderer with
women—he married young his first wife, but sadly had affairs and ultimately an arranged marriage with her—for
17 years before he finally divorced and remarried to a (much) younger woman, Hergé supposedly had been abused
by his older male cousin he lived with when he was a child, and was obsessed with scouting—and he had also
homoerotic encounters with his scout troop. It’s been theorized that this might be why he didn’t have many
females in his stories, he would mention that he just didn’t think women were “funny” or want to make fun of
them—not in a misogynist way, but seemingly out of respect.

As a kid, I don’t think I consciously thought of the homo-social implications of the Tintin world, but was attracted
to it deeply nevertheless, and to Tintin as a character. He was bold, true, honest, courageous, fun, but also
serious, compassionate and empathic. In America, for my half-Jewish queer self, he was a mensch, a noble
character, and a seemingly gay one. Although Hergé was from Belgium, the stories of Tintin are like Swiss
clockwork, amazingly intricate and precise, and the images are packed like paintings, each panel exquisite in its
majesty and mastery of form, line, perspective, color, composition, and storytelling. Hergé had assistants, but he
was the master that oversaw the entire operation, and its impossible to tell what wasn’t in his hand, as he
micromanaged every detail.

In this image, there is so much storytelling. The notorious magpie that steals the emerald appears in this first
panel, like a Hitchcockian foreshadowing (Hergé loved Hitchcock!) on the start of a bucolic stroll about to have a
spark of a plot when the trio of Tintin, Haddock, Tintin’s dog Snowy encounter gypies temporally living on
Haddock’s property. But I just love the beauty of the scene—it reminds me of my favorite Van Gogh painting,
1890’s “Road with Cypress and Star”, that is at the Kröller-Müller Museum, in Otterlo, near Amsterdam, and
depicts two male farmers walking down a country lane in the early evening together, another beautiful homo-
social encounter. I wanted to stay true to the comic image, with these feelings intact, trying to keep as close as I
could to the original (off register) color, that would also allow for my painterly feelings to come through, and love
for these characters and the comics. I added more detail to the figures than was in the original, that must have
been tiny for when Hergé was rendering. I brought in more details for Haddock’s face from a close up in the album
“Flight 714 to Sydney” and for Tintin, “Tintin in Tibet” when he feels his “dear friend” Chang Chong-Chen is still
alive (based on his real-life Chinese exchange student friend that influenced “The Blue Lotus” and changed Hergé’s
artistic career). I wanted to the feeling of the painting to be exuberant, like these two men, however their
sexuality, might love each other, strolling through nature, much like my husband and I love one another in the
nature of our home in the desert, or when we went on an artistic pilgrimage to Holland to immerse ourselves in
Van Gogh and all the art there.

Hergé was specifically inspired by Switzerland, he and his wife(s) would escape there for vacations and sojourns,
especially when Hergé was stressed out about life (which was often). I assume the nature of this landscape was
also inspired by Switzerland, making it even more pertinent for Art Basel. So many children around the world are
inspired by Tintin, even today, and especially those who grew up in Europe, where Tintin still is a legendary comic
series beloved by millions. It is his true spirit, his honesty, and his friendships that give heart and soul to his
exciting adventures, and Hergé’s love for people, and for all regions that he explored meticulously for each heavily
researched and rendered tome.

I listened to a biography of Hergé while painting this, in addition to legendary jazz music that he might have
listened to when he was rendering his comics (he reportedly loved jazz!). This made sense, as the spirit of the
image seemed to be infused with a jazzy feeling of exuberance and excitement, two gentlemen and their dog

starting out on a journey together in nature, in love with the land and with one another, with feelings of joy and
comradeship that I hope is conveyed in this work. I have also taught comics for my entire adult career as a teacher
and professor, and have begun a Visual Narrative Art program at the University of Southern California where I am a
full tenured Professor of Art (after teaching comics at the School of Visual Arts in NYC—that began as a
professional cartooning and illustration school—and teaching fine art at Columbia MFA, Yale MFA, NYU and many
more great institutions). I have loved comics and have taught them to thousands of students, and my installations
of paintings are like comic panels that “talk to one another” in non-linear narrative ways. I’m hoping this painting
not only conveys my love for Tintin, but also for Hergé and comics in general. He is the master of European comics
(and created the whole “clear line” school of cartooning!) and I signed it with his name—and my own, hidden in
the leaves of the bushes in the foreground, as I hope, like he had in his lifetime many collaborators, that he would
approve of this collaboration. He always wanted to be a “fine artist” (and tried his hand at abstraction to no
avail!), and I hope he would appreciate, unlike the Duchampian moves of Lichtenstein and Warhol simply bringing
in a comic panel as a “readymade” to fine art, that my love for his strip and his characters, and the emotion and
feeling and painterly true expression honors his great work and builds upon it into a new realm of capturing time,
contemplation, and feeling (and the politics of what I read into the strip!).