Although it was eighteen years ago, I created this work as of this writing, this is one of those paintings that I completely remember painting, when I finished it was like an epiphany. This is from a film still from the movie East of Eden, James Dean’s first of three movies before he would die tragically young. In the scene of the film, he is talking with his co-star Julie Harris who played his character’s brother’s girlfriend in this Cain and Abel story, about their future and hopes and dreams, and who Dean’s character Caleb is really like. While musing on the story, but more about Dean, who was gay, and was powerfully persistent in getting what it is he wanted to become a great artist and change the world, it was inspiring, and I was spirited away with my brush. Sometimes when painting, as Philip Guston would recount, a “third hand” starts controlling your brush—is as if you aren’t the one painting the picture, but watching yourself as your hands move, like projecting yourself when dancing and seeing yourself dance to music with friends with a sense of remove. There is an uncanniness to the process—a real “right brain” scenario even though we don’t believe in a strictly defined right vs. left brain way of thinking. But this painting did come right into place. I love Van Gogh like everyone, but also find affinity as he was in his own way queer as he never fit into the phallocentric patriarchal order, he loved Gauguin so much he cut off his own ear when Gauguin left him and was spiritual but could never be a preacher so put everything he felt and thought into his work.  Dean was the same way—I don’t know if he was spiritual per se, but he believed in spirits and the afterlife, and the spirit of art to move people and change things for the better.

I painted this in our super-illegal sublet in SoHo when I was trying to forge a place back into the art world after leaving it abruptly and stupidly in the hubris of my youth. I was painting literally in a closet with my partner/boyfriend now husband in the other room, our shower in the kitchen and building a body of work around the homoerotic sci-fi screenplay I wrote called “Hamlet 1999.” I was thinking about that character’s contemplative antagonism to patriarchal authority and rulership in the age of George W. Bush getting us into America’s longest wars, and how he was positioned in the resulting salon-style show, brought exactly how it was built up from in my apartment, I had Dean as Hamlet looking at Claudius, as played by the cyborg version of Yul Brynner in Westworld—as a proxy for the then President Bush.  Dean would have made a wonderous Hamlet, and it was cool to cast him as this character, but also myself as I sutured into his quixotic world, painting like a method actor the greatest method actor who did change the world, posthumously, like Van Gogh.