While noticing the world around me...

There seems to be a trend going on right now with young men in the realm of figure painting, portraits of serial killers is really vogue with the fellas right now, I haven't seen anyone younger than 28 doing this, so our age bracket. This is something that I have noticed over the last couple of years, the reach of this trend, of course, has even made its way to alumni and even some of the guys in my class. The most frequently used face is Ted Bundy's and then Manson, maybe Ed Gein, never saw Gacey. I think that is because both Bundy and Manson were very sexually charged and frustrated characters, there is also a level of misogyny (too many male painters are, most with not enough balls to come out and say it, but this is the world we live in).

So I was thinking…

I recently came to terms with my work and its relation o feminism. That is to say, my interest, conceptually, is placing women in their space and suspending them from their roles as women, and showing them as humans first. This often leads to figures in indeterminate locations and making them so vague the viewer wouldn’t even realize that he is looking at a woman. Good.

So I am going to have my own rebuttal to all of this boy’s club bullshit that brings us to….

Aileen Wuornos was executed in 2002 for the murder and robberies of seven men. Why her? Glad you asked. The ‘typical’ woman serial killer kills folks she knows, in their homes or hers, and kills by ways of stabbing, poisoning, or drowning. Not Aileen, she was a hooker and began killing her Johns in cold blood and stealing their cars- killing strangers outdoors in cold blood with a gun. The movie about her came out really soon after her execution, in the scene of her first victim, and according to her testimony in court, the first killing was in self-defense. A day or two before her execution, she admitted that the first victim was not self-defense at all. The movie had already been shot at this point; the producers were just waiting for her death before releasing the picture. She wasn’t some damsel in distress gone rogue, no black widow, she didn’t even like men, she was a killer, plain and simple.