FRENZY: Cunanan

“While I have a love of all practical art forms, my personal passion is for illustration, which also drives my private art making practice,” Drew Bickford, 2008
FRENZY (2008) is a series of illustrations based on the sociopathic mental states of three real-life murderers: Joseph Kallinger, Andrew Cunanan and Dennis Rader. While researching the backgrounds of the subjects and their violent criminal histories, Bickford constructed his own visual interpretations of their pathologies. While the content of each drawing maps the dark narratives of the murderer’s actions, the organic but neurotically insistent mark-making consciously references the malevolent internal forces that motivated these crimes. Despite denying the viewer the chance to identify the subject, a distinct portrait of each criminal is created via a constellation of visual clues. Similar to a crime scene, the drawings offer scores of potential leads, each hinting at the disturbed mental state of the subject. Consequently, the viewer creates their own portrait of the subject in their mind.