Painting: Latent Prints

John Gacy

Publication Date: 1986

About this Item

The people who handed this painting off to me reacted with horror when asked if they wanted a receipt. "You may just want to throw that away," they said, and sped away. The painting was wrapped in layers of newspapers on which they had written 'WARNING GACY" The painting is a 16 x 23 canvas on which someone has applied a number of handprints and footprints in black and red and signed it "Cook County Jail John Gacy 1986." It is apparent that the anonymous donors of this painting believed it to be the work of serial rapist and torture killer John Wayne Gacy. In the years since, I have done some research on the painting and have come up only with these hints: John Wayne Gacy almost never signed a painting without his middle name or initial. But sometimes he did. John Wayne Gacy very seldom did a painting with a white background; his paintings tend to be more elaborate. And yet sometimes he did paintings with white backgrounds, and he did a few involving a red handprint. John Wayne Gacy, in 1986, was in prison in Randolph County, Illinois, not in the Cook County Jail. But I do not have a day-to-day account of where he was during the long, involved appeals process and other activities between his death setnence and his execution in 1994. He could very well have spent enough time in Cook County at some point to do a few canvases. And, in any case, he was not under oath while painting. So here it is. It may genuinely be a painting by a particularly loathsome and self-centered individual; it may be a protest painting done by somebody else entirely. (The signature looks reasonably like Gacy's on his other paintings, but signing with a paintbrush is not the same as a pen or pencil autograph.) On the principle that I am not here to censor local history (Gacy found most of his victims in a park not far from where I live, and a friend of a friend was never seen again after entering the Gacy house) and on the principle that I just don't want it sitting around here any more, I offer it as it stands. I have been given some additional information, to the effect that Gary put a serial number on the backs of his paintings, starting well before the date of this one. This does NOT have such a number. Seller Inventory # jwg-0

Bibliographic Details

Title: Painting: Latent Prints

Publication Date: 1986

Binding: No Binding

Condition: Near Fine