Met, and was a huge inspiration to me—of the Holy Trinity crowning of Mary, it is both rendered fastidiously, but also has the life and nuance of a spiritual unconscious driving the work. It has more life to me than the American Gilbert Stuart’s famous presidential portraits, such as the Lansdowne Portrait of Washington at the National Gallery, which seems awkward and stiff. And although I love these early American (and based on life and photos, perhaps for the first time) portraits of Lincoln by his contemporaries Healy and Wilson. I do love some of these early American works, and even though Stuart was like a Warhol of his time, as he repeated motifs and did many copies of the same portrait of Washington for money, he was also able to paint transcendent beauties like the Skater in the National Gallery. As much as I appreciate these great American Portraits, I think we can revisit historical paintings with less academic restraint, and like the old masters, try to invoke a spiritual, subconscious, transcendent painterly poetry to the proceedings, that not only depict these great figures, but also allow for the images to portray the inner personality of the people, and the ineffable effect they ultimately had on our world and culture.
feelings of our life experience that hopefully gives the work itself a life of its own.
A8
Peanuts: Pictures to Color (Homage to Alicia), 2005 oil on linen 38 x 24 inches
This was a very special painting, as it was for my husband Andrew in memory of his best friend Alicia, who had died due to HIV related causes. Like us, she loved all things Snoopy, and had given me this coloring book (the painting was an appropriation of the cover) the last time I had seen her, and I painted this just after she died. When I make works, like a method actor, I really try to get into the “head” of the person and/or scene that I’m painting, to try bring emotion and life to the work--I listen to relevant music and audiobooks about the scene I’m depicting, and very much meditative on my thoughts while working. For this, of course I was thinking of our great friend Alicia, and was mournful of her passing, and really was thinking of her, and our relationship to her, and having these emotions and feelings suture into the iconography of the characters in the painting.
A7
Andrew and I, 2013-14 oil on linen 48 x 72 inches (diptych)
The artist Joe Bradley curated me into a show at Gavin Brown’s in 2012 and I recreated the work, as we really didn’t want to sell this one. I like the new version as much as the first, ultimately they are still about Alicia, but also our relationship not just with her, but evolving after her passing both emotionally and for me, as an artist since that time. Like how early Snoopy looked a lot different from later renditions of Snoopy, my work had grown as I had, the images look different, but hopefully both are good.
Andrew and I is based on our respective Mom’s favorite childhood pictures of my husband and myself, taken about age 4. We’ve been together for 23 years now, and born just 4 days apart from one another, so romantically we seemed destined to be with one another, and its always struck me how these images easily go together, with Andrew standing on a “stairway to heaven” looking in my direction, with me on a “flying carpet.” Although Andrew is Latino/Native American and is a brunette, as a child he was a towhead, although uncannily, we still wear similar clothes. Andrew had jackets just like this one now (although not the shorts!), and we both have t-neck white sweaters, and I still love wearing boots (I grew up in Colorado, hence the boots in my picture). Andrew’s photo was hand-colored, mine was black and white, and it was interesting to interpret the colors in the images while painting – it was interesting that the backgrounds happened to turn out blue and pink. While working, as I always do, I try to get into the “heads” of my portraits, listening to music that is meaningful to my subject matter, listening to audiobooks and so on. It was fun to listen to the late 60’s/early 70’s music of our youth (including Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin for Andrew, the American Graffiti soundtrack, Cat Stevens, the Who and Steve Martin comedy albums for me, amongst many many others). For children’s portraits, I think that Goya is one of the best. I’ve always loved his portrait of the boy in red with the magpie and cats (Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuniga), and strived to create something here that was just as uncanny and alive, with more than just merely a pleasant picture of whimsical youth and more of a portrait that is impacted with ineffable
A9
View of Empire from a Train, 2011 oil on linen 48 x 36 inches Collection of Greg and Patricia Lichko, Cleveland
This is an image of the Empire State Building I painted from a photo I took from a subway train window coming back from a
463