The story behind the image:

This is a painting installation executed in cooordination with the Sleng Genocide Museum and the Yale Genocide Project who shared countless materials and photographs from which to work. It speaks to the countess documented indignities these unfortunate subjects had to tolerate at the hands of their cruel captor Kaing Guek Eav, known as Comrade Duch, in the S-22 Tuol Sleng torture chamber and prison, formerly the high school in which he taught.

Comrade Duch was part of the ultra-communist clique, the Khmer Rouge, that turned Cambodia into a vast slave labor camp and charnel house in which 1.7 million or more died of starvation, disease and executions.

The painting of Comrade Duch was based on the original photograph taken in Cambodia by photographer Stuart Isset when he came upon Duch in Western Cambodia. It is the unattached portrait in the upper right portion of the piece. Altogether, I set out to paint thirty portraits that might depict the utter senselessness in this particular genocide. His was in color to emphasize his depraved dominence over these young people who were among 14,000 tortured and killed on his orders to schedule deaths of women and children on pre-assigned days.

This one year project was emotionally devastating to paint, considering what each of these poor young souls had to endure.

When the Vietnamese crossed the Cambodian border, the leader of the Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot, ordered Comrade Duch to free the remaining prisoners. Instead, he murdered every captive innocent in S-22.

He has since been arrested and tried, solely due to the efforts of Nic Dunlop, author of The Lost Executioner who together with photographer Stuart Isset heroically tracked Comrade Duch down and turned him in to Cambodian authorities (who later arrested him while hiding in the dense jungles posing as a church pastor.)

Shortly thereafter, I was graciously given access to Issac's photos of Kaing Guek Eav to paint. His light sentence was a crime in of itself, amounting to eleven hours for every innocent life he took.