| BOB DRAKULICH |
Jared Loughner
This is a watercolor portrait that confronts community conscientiousness. Watercolor is an innocent medium, commonly associated with the silliness of children’s doodles and the soft touch of a grandmother’s summer afternoon activity. By inverting the expectations of the material it further challenges the audience’s perspective and participation. To retain audiences’ attention, today's Media discloses gruesome details and cathartic moments of tearful tragedies. The media has not limited its approach to just reporting the brutal details of the wrongdoing but has thrusted constant images of the crime into our lives. The arrest photo of Jared Loughner is tantalizing, with high color saturations producing electric yellow skin tones, intensifying his oddly contorted facial expression. We’ve all seen it and been eerily captivated by it. Just as the idea of painting a portrait of a mass murderer should be offensive, the idea that we are all so familiar with the source material should be as well. In his rendition of the song Streets of Loredo, Johnny Cash sang, "Then go write a letter to my grey-haired mother, An' tell her the cowboy that she loved has gone. But please not one word of the man who had killed me. Don't mention his name and his name will pass on."