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Three Man Patrol

Deborah Oropallo was inspired by the Rodney King riots to paint Three Man Patrol in 1993. The work is three individual oil paintings on canvas, each featuring a life-sized portrait of a uniformed police officer in front of a light peach and blue background. With the three panels side by side, this work spans just over six feet tall by nine feet wide.

The men wear white riot helmets with dark visors pulled down over their eyes, and they each hold a white-tipped black baton with both hands, posed at the ready, diagonally from above the left shoulder down to the right hip. The left-most officer is in three-quarter profile, and the other two face forward. They have all adopted an identical stance and grip on their batons and all have skin painted with the same dark gray.

From a distance, the three figures may appear to be photographs. On closer inspection, it becomes clear they are painted. Their solemn faces are slightly smeared, and white badges, patches, and buttons on their black uniforms lack any detail. Thinned paint even drips down their arms from a bright white patch or down their chests from a badge. Holstered guns and handcuffs on their waistbands are little more than vague shapes and spots of highlights.

The work is abstracted with two more elements. First, a hazy outline like an aura around each officer with brown and orange striations. It follows the contour of each man from head to toe and around the top end of the baton. The second element consists of very faint, type-written words stenciled on from a police manual. They fill all of the background except for a small segment at the bottom where the men stand. Before the men were painted, the typed text from the police manual was laid down on the light peach background, and a wash of pale blue paint was brushed on in wide horizontal strokes. The lettering is large, so that only a few words can fit in the three-foot width of each canvas, and many of those disappear behind the officers. With the stencil then removed, the words are the same faint color as the background and are only barely readable by the blue outlines of the letters. “This riot policeman” and “baton” can be discerned, but many words are too light to read, though ever-present. The bottom section is slightly darker peach with the blue wash streaking down like the reflection of the text on a still body of water.