The 20th Century Room
The Intruder
1996, Acrylic on Canvas, 21" x 29In a trip to New York we saw a retrospective of Hans Richter at the Guggenheim Museum and among the deconstructivist tricks he employed in his tedious career was painting things upside down. This creates a twinning difficulty both in representing and in decoding the visual image. So I think that was a pretty direct influence on the crazy angle I depict this scene from. The fairly obvious permutation is the question "What if the subject being painted is already upside down?" An interesting aspect also is the way my modern vocabulary mixes upside down and diminished (basically photographic) foreshortening of the figures.
But the real story is the way that the real subject wrote itself into this painting. While we slept the burglars sneaked into the yard and silently removed thousands of dollars of tools and equipment left in the open while we showed our art in the studio. And came back to the neighborhood on several successive nights. It was an unsettling experience, and then one evening the intruder just appeared in the doorway in the painting that had been prepared for him.
