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Among these many moods of Hillary, an eight-foot-tall portrait stands out. Hillary’s face is molded in a familiar expression — lips tight, chin slightly raised, her demeanor serious and authoritative. To her detractors, this “don’t fuck with me, fellas” look might epitomize what they dislike about her. The twist here is she’s buck naked, staring you down as if to say, “What are you looking at?” Her aging flesh and sagging breasts are painted in loving detail. “I could have made her more erotic, but this is the beauty of the real. There’s no artifice. She’s stripped bare,” Ferguson explains.
On Christmas Day 2007, she posted an image of Naked Hillary on Flickr.com. “I was so involved in political blogging, and I wanted to talk about things that weren’t being discussed, like the sexism [that Hillary provoked]. Within a week, I had 500 hits.” Things continued at that pace until Flickr tagged the image at the end of February. But Ferguson was happy with the results of her experiment. “The only way to find it was by typing ‘hillary naked’ in the search, so at that moment, there were a lot of people who wanted to see Hillary naked! I really tapped into something.”
Until about six years ago, Ferguson, 43, was pursuing a career as a math professor. But shortly after she was awarded tenure at Wayne State University in Detroit, Ferguson asked for a leave of absence and moved to New York in 2002 to paint full time. She enrolled in an MFA program at the School of Visual Arts in 2006, and graduated this past spring. “Both math and painting are a search for truth, and both are a battle. I would end up with a big pile of scratch paper, trying to figure out a formula, and I must have painted over Naked Hillary five times, trying to get it right.”
UK broadcaster 5 has ordered three Royal Family documentaries from Fremantle label Naked and Krempelwood that explore the rise in popularity of Queen Camilla, the relationship between Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip and the shocking scandal engulfing Sarah Ferguson and the so-called “Fake Sheikh.”
LARRY S. FERGUSON ‘SARA’ NUDE BLACK AND WHITE PHOTO
