Sport
This painting was created for the 2012 Pop Art theme to benefit the Zimmer Childrenʼs Museum in Los Angeles.
Sandy Koufax, was one of the greatest left handed baseball pitchers ever. His time with the Brooklyn/Los Angeles Dodgers,remains a golden period in Dodger history. The painting reflects the elements of change, seen both as allergory and symbolism and imagines how this Pop Icon remains a resonant figure within the fabric of American Sports and social consciousness.
When the Dodgers moved from the east to the west coast the shift in the pycho-geography was monumental. The figure of Koufax spanned this ʻtransitionʼ which the picture reflects, suggesting how through the action of the pitch, the lower left symbol for Brooklyn becomes manifested within the top right as LA. The yellow butterfly in the lower right appears to symbolise this subtlely on the mound. The Red Pegasus sign for Mobil gas, adds a contrasting color code as well as suggesting advertising metaphors often used in Pop culture, allowing mythic syntax to prevail within an art historic context, as if the power surge of gas fuels the figure to enact his biomechanic choreography.
When Koufax retired he became an NBC baseball sports analyst as shown by the NBC logo of the peacock.The Facebook search bar at the top of the painting offers another dimension to the work, providing the conceptual framework of the art, where the picture plane assumes the FB profile page of the LA Dodgers, with Koufaxʼs name in Hebrew asserting ʻidentityʼ as an eternal evocation of this great athlete.