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WHERE A RAKER RESTS
Oil on canvas, 36 x 48 inches, 1984
(Private collection, Lakeland, Florida)
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This painting is particularly important for the artist because it was the first work commissioned and painted in Florida. It is also a good example showing the stylistic developments in the artist's works, from relatively uncomplicated (populated by only a few characters) to including literally dozens of figures. Already here it is easy to see that the painting shows an imaginary world invented by the artist to accommodate certain interesting elements pertaining to the lives of the owners of the work. In this case, one owner was a professor of Spanish, particularly interested in the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, and the other was a former ballerina. The title of the painting comes from the figure of a "raker" (a man responsible for raking the field) resting by one of the haystacks. The details show a prisoner escaping from jail and a Chinese woman standing not far from the sun-dial and looking down at the main street of this sunken town. They were included in the composition purely for decorative purposes (Why not?). On the opposite side stands a stone construction resembling Stonehenge, with an inscription in Latin: Nihil nimis (Nothing in excess). That expression may actually be related to the overall composition of the painting, which was conceived as relatively simple to emphasize the interesting details, but not to overwhelm them.
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