Framed Blue Tennis Court Square Fauvist Original Sports Painting

When I was a Williams College student, the institution acquired the Sterling Brown archive. Brown was a major Harlem Renaissance figure, a poet and a long-time professor at Howard University. He was also a Williams alum. I was lucky enough to spend some time looking at his journals, letters, and syllabi in the library. Digging through this archival treasure trove, I found myself most charmed by the letters he and University of Chicago anthropology professor and fellow Williams alum, Allison Davis exchanged. Brown was referred to affectionately and inexplicably as "Dutch." The two professors' mutual spirit of playful competition shines from the pages of their letters, often expressed in conversations about tennis. One tells of a delightful tennis racquet he recently borrowed, the other boasts of a match won, they both needle one another affectionately about future games. These letters, more than any poem making a claim on immortality, seem to revive their writers as we read them. They are not, here, serious college professors, educators, men of letters. Rather, they are friends, young men who love their game and revel in the shared nature of this passion. I have wanted to paint a sort of ode to these letters for a long time, I hope this one is just the first of many. I don't know what kinds of courts they were playing on, but I used my favorite blue for the ground of this piece to express my own strange balance of awe and affection for this poet and person. The painting features a Black man, about to strike the acid green tennis ball before him with a red tennis racquet. The ground beneath him is the blue of the sky we might imagine above. It is my paltry ode to this great man, and to the human being he was beneath that greatness. It is, I guess, also an ode to the archive with its extraordinary ability to grant us glimpses of the human beings beneath great works. Painted on MDF board with a narrow, attached frame. 12x12 by approx. 2/3 of an inch.