For the last few years, Mark Takamichi Miller has been using discarded and abandoned photographs as sources for his paintings, allowing him to free the work from personal references as well as enabling him to explore the way portraiture functions at a time of inexpensive and ubiquitous snapshot imagery. He invents a new method of paint application for each roll of film, resulting in drastically different looks for each series.

The roll of film used in Thieves was left behind by someone breaking into a car and contained images of party scenes, people high on various drugs, men making gang signs, and a pitbull. The paint application reflects the subject matter; it is raw and aggressive, some of the paint is burned while other areas have been thickly sculpted out of pure oil paint and then cut out leaving sharp changes in depth. The portrait of the pitbull is sleek and shiny made of transparent thick plastic with a frothy shadow of rough around the edge.