July Notes - 2024
Not everyone would expect that the first paintings I did after my experience at Giverny would be a series of boxing paintings, but it was.
While the other artists left the residency in September, I received permission to stay until the end of November. The gardens were closed and, in fact, the tractors had already dug up the flower beds. The Japanese bridge was completely dismantled in order to be rebuilt, much of the gift shop had been packed up and put away in the artist’s apartments, and the weather turned a bleak gray, like a New England rainy fall day.
Worst of all, the sun set earlier and earlier each day, which drove me indoors, and now being alone I turned to the TV for company. One night I came across a boxing match and one of the fighters sustained a bad cut over his eye. The cut appeared magenta on the screen. His eyes were a vibrant green, his face pink, his 5 o’clock shadow had a blue tinge to it. In essence, he looked like an Impressionist painting.
About ten years earlier I was the sound person for a documentary on Cus D’Amato’s gym and the then 15 year old Mike Tyson. Seeing this TV fighter brought my two worlds together - my work in documentaries and in painting, now I could follow in the foot steps of George Bellows and Thomas Eakins and do my own take on boxing paintings, one informed by my 18 months “in the ring.”
Read more about the development of the boxing series HERE
See more paintings HERE
PAINTINGS FROM THE BOXING SERIES
BLOGS ABOUT THE BOXING SERIES
HISTORY SPOTLIGHT: EAKINS AND BELLOWS
Thomas Eakins, “Between Rounds”
George Bellows, “Stag at Sharkey’s”
The boxing paintings of Eakins and Bellows inspired me to return to the ring to make a series of paintings. Bellows said, "I don't know anything about boxing, I'm just painting two men trying to kill each other."
I know quite a bit about boxing, and I wanted to convey what I came to understand about boxing from Cus d'Amato, Teddy Atlas,Mike Tyson, and my own observations.
FROM THE LIBRARY : MARK KRIEGEL -THE GOOD SON
I got to know Mark Kriegel when he contacted me about my time at Cus d’Amato’s Gym. I wanted to see how he wrote so I picked up his biography of fighter Boom-Boom Mancini, who tragically killed his opponent Duk Koo Kim, when he knocked him out in the 14th round in a brutal battle at Ceasar’s Palace and Kim never regained consciousness. I saw that fight on TV in real time. We were working on the documentary at the time, and I saw first hand how it rocked the boxing world.
This is a very sensitive rendering of that story, that took Kriegel to Korea to discover what drove Kim to persist in this fight, that should have been called before its tragic end.
AT THE MOVIES: ROCKY IV
Rocky IV was a forgettable film in the Rocky franchise, with a less than credible plot around Cold War themes. But what I do remember is watching the film with Mike Tyson while we were in Colorado Springs filming his fights in the Junior Olympics. We were killing time before his first fight and nerves were running high.
Tyson went on to win all of his bouts, including one where he had the fastest knock out in the history of boxing — 8 seconds. If he hadn’t had to walk to the middle of the ring, it would have been faster.
When we came out of the film, I remember Mike saying, “If anyone ever got hit that hard in the ring, no one would be a fighter.”
ART SPOTLIGHT: GATHERING FORCES
Gathering Forces, at only 4 inches x 4 inches, is a tiny painting that punches above its weight.
For other small paintings click here.