Museum of Bad Judgement

The Museum of Bad Judgement is a series of paintings based on an unpublished memoir by my grandfather, Malcolm Bruce Spaulding who was the Polk County district attorney and later a private practice attorney in Salem and Portland in the middle of the last century. His memoir is called Some Interesting Criminal Cases I Have Tried and covers several murder cases that took place between 1943 and 1965.
These paintings are my own meditations on his writings that I discovered several years after he passed way from Alzhiemer’s Disease. I am not painting crime scenes, or dead bodies. I am interested in the smaller parts of the stories. The signs, the people, the buildings. I am exploring the times before the turning points, the moments before everything went sideways.