Shikar 1980

LeRoy Neiman made this crazily energetic painting called Shikar with what looks like quick, confident strokes and a pretty wild palette. The way he handles color here is so instinctive, you get the sense that he's making decisions on the fly, which is really exciting. Up close, you can almost feel the texture of the paint, like he’s just letting it all hang out there. The surface has this raw, unfiltered quality, especially when you look at the tiger at the front. It is rendered in stripes of oranges and browns, which form a kind of diagonal opposition to the thick and juicy greens and yellows of the vegetation beneath it. The whole surface vibrates. Neiman reminds me of someone like Francis Bacon, who also embraced the unexpected and turned it into something powerful.