How did the city of Pittsburgh influence his art?
He once said, “We all live a kind of a double life. We all have our real America – Pittsburgh, Texas, Wyoming – and then we have a fantasy America, which is our dream of what everybody else is doing and all the places that we’re not.” And in a way what his art is about is those things that flash between the places we really are and the places we’re dreaming of being, and so I think his art is always about Pittsburgh. It’s always about that kid who sat looking out a window, because there was no radio, for hours at a time. He’s the kid who walked three miles each way with his mom to a church to sit for hours on end watching the absolutely flat screen of the altar. No works of art more resemble Andy Warhol’s paintings of Marilyn or Liz or Jackie than the iconic images in a Byzantine Catholic church, totally representational and absolutely not naturalistic at the same time. When it came to 1962, the day news came out that Marilyn had killed herself, when he decided that day to do a paintin
