You Don’t Know Jesus
This was the third painting in the Project Mogwai series, completed in October 2008. Peter Sutcliffe, ‘The Yorkshire Ripper’, cast a long dark shadow over my childhood, one that lingers to this day. He committed his first murder when I was seven, and was eventually caught when I was twelve years old. It’s hard to convey what it was like growing up in Leeds when all of that was going on, because we still had the heatwave of ’76, Tom Baker as the best Dr Who, Tiswas, Grange Hill, the Silver Jubilee, all of that, but hanging over it all was this rumbling thunderhead of dread and horror that would every few months or so make its presence felt. When he was eventually caught there was widespread disbelief that this “monster” everyone had grown to fear turned out to be a weedy little bloke from Bradford who looked like OddBod Junior from Carry On Screaming. It was inevitable that I would one day have to paint him, probably as some sort of fumbling attempt at exorcism.
Mogwai – You Don’t Know Jesus
