Work/Life Balance
Criminal Defense Lawyer Moonlights as Painter of Serial Killers
Posted Aug 11, 2008, 12:28 pm CST
By Martha Neil
When he's not working as a criminal defense attorney, Martin Baker needs a way to relax. So the central California practitioner paints as his avocation.
One of his frequent subjects: serial killers.
Using mug shots as his model, at a time when his subjects knew they had finally been defeated by law enforcement, Baker has painted a series of black-and-white portraits of notorious serial killers such as Ted Kaczynski (aka the Unabomber), and Kenneth Bianchi, who was one of the so-called Hillside Stranglers who terrorized Los Angeles in the late 1970s, according to Scripps Howard News Service. A fine arts major in college, he worked his way through law school by painting signs.
"I'm an armchair psychologist, just like anybody else," he says. "It's easy to look at a mug shot and wonder what's going on in their minds at that very time. I can say more through painting than the original photos would."