The painting series Wild Horses is based on The Misfits (1961), which dealt with the imminent disappearance of those quintessential icons, Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable, “The American Cowboy” and the unblemished western frontier. In my series of paintings, the intense wild horse scene infers anti-western expansion, supposedly caused Gable a heart attack before the film was finished shooting. Gable demanded on doing all of his own stunts, including being dragged around on his stomach by a lassoed horse and wrestling it to the ground (depicted in Too Tired To Die). In the painting Bombshell, Monroe who was once called “champagne on the screen” by Arthur Miller, the film’s screenwriter and Monroe’s husband at the time, is instead, like the horses, “captured” in a moment of pure emotional vulnerability. By painting the rest of the images as negatives, Monroe’s subjective viewpoint and horrified confusion regarding the incident with the horses coincides with our own historical confusion.
