Jack The Ripper Content! Fair Warning!

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Still see pastels as the pretty medium?

Pastel work by Cameron Hampton is by no means timid.  Nor is it for the timid viewer!  The challenges begin the moment you realize the subject is murder.  To be specific, the Whitechapel murders and the unsolved cases attributed to Jack the Ripper are given the artist's treatment. Because the camera was relatively new in the day (1888), the London police used photography to record to distinctly grizzly results of these serial murders.  More is the pity, because if the camera were still to be invented, we would have had proper forensic drawings, and perhaps a little bit better evidence as a result.  

Enter the contemporary fine art of Cameron Hampton.  Her not-delicate treatments, while not intended as forensics, are instead intended to emote the feelings of inhumanity that go along with dismemberment in the streets.  Now go a step further.  Realize that technique and materials, in the hands of the artist, ascend to well more than just the sum of the parts.  Here we have an experience that says more than court records, newsprint and crude photography: it says murder in ways no other medium can say.

Tomorrow: I introduce you to Cameron.