The Boxing Match Painting

The painting was inspired by an iconic black and white photograph of Rocky Marciano winning the world heavyweight championship from Jersey Joe Walcott in 1952. As powerful and brilliant as the photograph is, there are things a flat, monochrome photograph cannot capture, express or fully convey. This gave rise to the imperative to paint. Boxing is called the sweet science. What name could be more paradoxical than this epithet given to pugilism? Is this not the toughest, hardest, most difficult and brutal profession, sport, vocation or calling on earth, and the hardest possible way to make a living, perhaps even to amass a fortune? So where is the sweetness? Boxing is full of paradoxes and metaphors. Like painters, boxers are called, inspired and conditioned to define themselves inside a confined space, a square, paradoxically named the ring, or canvas. We artists are illusionists. We create the illusion that real objects are actually there in the illusory spaces we manufacture. The terrifyingly real space fighters enter is empty but for a searing light that savagely floodlights their bodies and illuminates every nuance of movement. Meanwhile the crowd rumbles in the black pulsating space all around the square ring of light like an invisible monster. Once inside the ropes the pugilists’ choices are narrowly prescribed into a range of dual possibilities: fight or run, attack or defend, bob and weave or take a punch to give a punch, move forward, slug or jab or dance – “float like a butterfly sting like a bee.” The boxer will have trained ferociously or will surely fall. During the process of creating this painting my mental and tactile sensibilities were intensified and heightened to a near trance-like state. I was deeply immersed psychologically and emotionally in the savage ritual - the crash of hard, taut leather against skin and bone, I sensed and saw the blood coursing inside flesh and muscle, drawn and running on facial features. I saw and heard the frenzied flash and thud of a thousand cameras. The final bell will toll for both victor and vanquished alike. My task is to transcend the physicality of paint, to push beyond the flat two-dimensionality of image and achieve experiential equivalence for both the viewer and myself. So the surface cannot lie flat and smooth and still. Instead textures appear. They rise, role, stretch out, sink, split and ripple, gathering and moving in rhythmic unison with the other elements - carrying the image with them so that it can live, breathe and communicate what it needs to say. Probably the greatest boxing writer, Norman mailer proclaims: “The boxing-match provides a metaphor for the schizoid nature of modern American life”. Mailer characterizes boxing as “ritualized violence” as did that other great writer and lover of the ‘sweet science’, Hemingway. For viewers who understand and appreciate boxing ‘The Boxing Match’ is intended as an affirmation and feast. For others it signals an invitation to investigate and learn from and about this most paradoxical of professions and thereby to understand and appreciate the enigma of where the sweetness, the poignancy and indeed the beauty can be found.

Painting:Oil on Canvas

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:78.7 W x 59 H x 2 D in

Delivery Time:Typically 5-7 business days for domestic shipments, 10-14 business days for international shipments.