Greed Gone Wild in 2008

Dec. 26, 2008— -- In a year defined by bailouts and bankruptcy, New York painter Geoffrey Raymond is one of the lucky few. His business is booming, selling pricey portraits of the business titans some say are responsible for today's financial crisis.

Caught on canvas are former Bear Stearns CEO James Cayne, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and former Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld.

If art is an unspoken language, Raymond has given his a voice, by asking passersby on Wall Street to scrawl their thoughts directly on his work. "Can I tempt you with a marker?" he asks.

A friend gave him the idea to paint the well-known Wall Street figures. "I'm giving a voice to the people who don't have a voice, even if it's five words on a painting; it's something." (Click here to visit Raymond's Web site.)

In September, shortly after Lehman Brothers announced the largest corporate bankruptcy in U.S. history, Raymond stationed himself outside company offices in Manhattan to ask employees and passersby to sign his portrait of Fuld.

"By a wide margin, the most popular word on my painting is greed," Raymond said.

The word "greed" seems to crop up on many portraits, "particularly with the CEOs of companies that have gone under, because people that are writing on those are frequently employees who have just lost their job and they are, in fact, angry," he added. "There's a sense that if people had settled for perhaps a little less, we all wouldn't be in this situation."

Similarly, on the portrait of Cayne, Raymond said, "a middle-aged woman wrote, 'My blood is boiling.'"

He said "many signatures seemed to be filled with anger and frustration, but the last annotation on the Cayne painting was, 'It's been a good ride.'"