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There is a painting hanging in our gallery right now of a man being thrown from a bull. The rider is upside-down, boots to the sky, suspended against a background of pure fire — reds and oranges and yellows that look less like a rodeo arena and more like the inside of a furnace. A black bull charges beneath him, head low, horns swinging. And to the right, walking calmly toward all of this, a rodeo clown. Hat on. Chaps swinging. Two thousand pounds of animal fury coming his way, and the man is stepping toward it like he's crossing a street.
Key Takeaways
- David Allan Smith's extraordinary life story — from INTERPOL fugitive to acclaimed painter — is inseparable from his art
- His Western landscapes and figurative works carry an intensity informed by years of living outside the law
- Smith's paintings are rare on the market, making authenticated works especially collectible
The painting is by David Allan Smith. You won't find his name in any museum catalog or MFA alumni directory. You'll find it on page eight of a 1985 publication by the U.S. Department of Justice.
A Guide to INTERPOL
In August 1985, the National Institute of Justice published "A Guide to INTERPOL: The International Criminal Police Organization in the United States," written by Michael Fooner. It was a practical handbook — how INTERPOL worked, how U.S. law enforcement used it, what happened when a case crossed borders. The book is organized by case studies, each one filed under a city heading. Under "Terminal Island, California," the guide describes the case of David Allan Smith.
In August 1985, the National Institute of Justice published "A Guide to INTERPOL: The International Criminal Police Organization in the United States," written by Michael Fooner.
Smith escaped from the federal penitentiary at Terminal Island by boat after a shootout with prison guards. He was twenty-eight. He had been a career criminal since the age of eighteen, with arrests in cities from New Orleans to Oklahoma City for thefts, frauds, and check forgeries. After the escape, he moved into more sophisticated territory — credit card fraud and rental car swindles. When the trail heated up, he made his way to Florida, obtained passports under false names for himself, his wife, and his young son, and fled to Europe. Deputy U.S. Marshal Tony Lopez telexed INTERPOL in Washington, requesting assistance in locating the fugitive.
They found him.
From Federal Fugitive to Painter
At some point after all of that — after Terminal Island, after the boat, after the shootout, the fake passports, the transatlantic flight with a family in tow, the international manhunt — David Allan Smith started painting.
Not painting the way people paint in continuing education classes or weekend workshops. Painting the way a man paints who has lived a particular kind of life and needs somewhere to put it. Acrylics on board. Bold. Hot. Unrefined in the way that matters — no formal training smoothing down the edges, no academic theory cooling the palette. Just the image and the feeling behind it, applied with thick strokes and the confidence of someone who doesn't second-guess.
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He gravitated toward rodeo scenes. It isn't hard to see why. The eight-second ride is the purest distillation of chaos and consequence in American life. The bull doesn't know your story. The rider has exactly one job — stay on — and the math is simple: you hold or you don't. The rodeo clown walks toward danger on purpose, every single time, because somebody has to. There's a moral clarity to all of it that Smith seems to have recognized.
The Work Itself
Smith's paintings run hot. The palette lives in the reds and burnt oranges, the deep amber of arena dust at golden hour, the shock of yellow where light catches a horn or the brim of a hat. His figures are bold and slightly compressed — heavy bodies rendered in confident strokes that don't bother with subtlety. The backgrounds dissolve into abstract fields of color, all heat and atmosphere, as though the scene is taking place inside a fire rather than in front of one.
"Rodeo Break" is a prime example. The composition captures the exact instant of separation — bull and rider coming apart, gravity not yet fully in charge, the clown already moving in. It's the split second between the ride and the wreck, frozen in paint. The bull is massive and dark, a solid shape anchoring the left side of the frame. The rider floats above in warm yellows, limbs loose, hat gone. The clown on the right is the calmest figure in the painting, which is exactly the point.
The paint is applied thick. No glazing, no careful blending. It goes where it goes and stays there. This is not the refined technique of an academically trained artist — it's the directness of someone who learned to paint by painting, and whose visual instincts were shaped by lived experience rather than art history surveys.
Outsider Art in the Truest Sense
The term "outsider art" gets applied loosely these days — to anyone self-taught, anyone working outside commercial gallery structures, anyone whose biography reads as unconventional. Smith's work earns the label in its most literal form. He came to art from genuinely outside the system — not just outside the art world, but outside civil society altogether. Federal prison, fugitive status, INTERPOL involvement. The distance between that life and a painting of a rodeo bull is the distance the work covers.
What makes the painting interesting is not just the biography. The biography gets you in the door. What keeps you is the work itself — the heat of it, the scale of the color, the way Smith compresses an entire arena's worth of energy into three figures and a wall of red. He painted the way he lived: all in, no hedging, nothing held back for later.
Currently Available
"Rodeo Break" is an original acrylic on board, framed in dark walnut with black inner liner and tan matting. It is available now through Austin Gallery for $9,500.
$9,500
It is available now through Austin Gallery for
"Rodeo Break" is an original acrylic on board, framed in dark walnut with black inner liner and tan matting.
This is a unique work — one painting, one story, one artist whose path from Terminal Island to the easel is documented not in gallery press releases but in the pages of a U.S. Department of Justice publication on international law enforcement. There is no edition. There is no series. There is this.
