The artist’s own words: “Scavengers is my visual description of how it feels to have one’s privacy invaded. The idea first came into my mind after a recent biography of my father was published. In it were intimate details of his personal life that were inevitably going to come out, but as well-written as the book was, my family found it hard to go through the experience of having our private life revealed to the public. Still harder was the experience of reading reviews of the book and people’s thoughtless comments. The characters in the painting are my siblings and I. As I planned the work I asked my sister and brother to describe their strongest emotion around the experience. My sister felt an impulse to protect her parents, my brother was afraid the book would provoke arguments and bad feelings, and I was nervous about how the personal information I had shared with the author would be written about and interpreted. I incorporated our responses into the composition.”
