Here’s is a rather grisly
painting of a man who had just been stabbed. I planned it out before painting it
and used myself as a bit of a model (paid myself £5,000). I don't think I'd
like to have it hanging on my wall but I lose interest in my paintings once
they're finished anyway (I see them once a month when I go up into the attic to
stop them all sticking to one another.)
Where did the idea spring from?
I like all those crime programmes that like Crimes
That Shocked The Nation and Real
Crime that summarise some of the well-known crimes in British recent years.
Many happened in the seventies when I was a boy and but I was about 30 I can
remember eating my tea in the evenings and watching the stabbing of Lee Harvey
unfold on the news.
Bar maid Tracie Andrews
stabbed her fiancé bus driver Lee Harvey with a pen knife in a pique of
jealousy. The aspiring model and her fiancé were driving on a country road back
to their flat in Alvechurch in Worcestershire in the
early hours on 1st December 1996. Both these attractive people (who each had a
child) had been magnetically drawn to one another but both were of a jealous
volatile disposition and explosive arguments were common. On that fateful night
on a rural road nobody knows what really happened but Tracie lost control and
stabbed Lee a total 42 times. Blood must have gushes after ten stabs but Tracie
continued until the white heat of jealousy cooled.
I can remember the story rolling
out on The 6, o, Clock News most evenings.
A distraught Tracie appeared at a press conference claiming a "fat man
with staring eyes" had stabbed her fiancé in a road rage incident and then
disappeared. For two weeks police tried to track the murderer down. Under much
pressure Tracie took an overdose and was taken to hospital. It was here
suspicious police detectives first questioned her about the murder. They
charged her soon after she'd been discharged.
She was found guilty at
Birmingham Crown Court on 29th July 1997 and sentenced to life imprisonment.
She claimed she was a victim of a miscarriage of justice due to the circus of
publicity around the court case. Two years later she admitted there was no mysterious
road rage incident and that she had stabbed her fiancé to death in
self-defence.
In prison she changed her
looks and name and had lesbian relationships. In November 2009 she underwent an
operation to correct her protruding bottom jaw. She was released in July 2011
after fourteen years in prison and has since got married (there's a book Pure Evil: How Tracie Andrews Murdered My Son.)
If you want to learn more
about the murder please go here...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xS-mX5fq858
If you want to buy the painting its
£30,000.
Sam doesn’t look impressed…
Looking at my pop whacking golf
balls…
Templeton Peck of the A Team doesn’t
look impressed either (note face on screen)…
About to paint the knife…
Looking at photos of Tracie Andrew
and Lee Harvey which (probably) subconsciously inspired this painting…