A black bull charges forward, head down, horns swinging — and the rider is already gone, launched upside-down into a sky the color of a five-alarm fire. To the right, a rodeo clown steps in. Not running. Stepping. Hat on, chaps swinging, moving toward two thousand pounds of furious animal like a man walking into his own kitchen. The background is pure heat — reds and oranges and yellows boiling together with no horizon line, no grandstand, no fence. Just the moment. The bull, the thrown man, the clown, and all that burning color.

This is a painting by David Allan Smith. If the name doesn't ring a bell, it shouldn't — not from gallery circles, anyway. In 1985, Smith's name appeared in a different kind of publication: "A Guide to INTERPOL," written by Michael Fooner for the U.S. Department of Justice. Page eight, under the heading "Terminal Island, California." The entry describes how Smith escaped from the federal penitentiary by boat after a shootout with prison guards. He was twenty-eight years old and had been a career criminal since eighteen — thefts, frauds, and check forgeries across cities from New Orleans to Oklahoma City. After the escape, he specialized in credit card fraud and rental car swindles, obtained false passports for himself, his wife, and his young son, and fled to Europe. Deputy U.S. Marshal Tony Lopez telexed INTERPOL in Washington. They found him.

At some point after all of that — after the prison break, the shootout, the fake passports, the international manhunt — Smith started painting. Acrylics on board. Rodeo scenes, mostly. He painted the way a man paints who has been inside a kind of violence most people only see on television, and who found something in the eight-second ride that he recognized. The bull doesn't care about your past. The clown walks toward danger because that's the job. The rider gets thrown and gets up or doesn't. There's a clarity in that.

If the name doesn't ring a bell, it shouldn't — not from gallery circles, anyway.

The work is raw. The palette runs hot — deep reds, burnt orange, flashes of yellow where the light catches a horn or the brim of a hat. The figures are rendered with heavy, confident strokes. No blending, no smoothing. The paint goes on thick and stays where it lands. This is outsider art in the truest sense of the term — work made by someone who came to painting not through school or mentorship but through the kind of life that leaves you with something you need to put somewhere.

Framed in a dark walnut frame with black inner liner and tan matting. Ready to hang.