Daredevil Artist research

I will use this post to enforce 2 sets of artist research for my Daredevil work, artists who paint boxing themed images and artist interpretations of 1970s New York. This will be my last section of research into this particular character.

Boxing painters:
Irvin James Pascal Jr.
Irvin Pascal himself is a boxer living in London who paints boxing images.

unfortunately I couldn't find any of his paintings without a watermark, but never the less you can see how striking (pardon the pun) these paintings are. The colours are so strong and vibrant and I love the contrast in the images. I love the intensity of these paintings and the emotion that is hard to capture in most artwork without it looking silly. Pascal clearly interprets the ferocity behind boxing and I love the colour technique. There's a very painterly quality to the work and I think this artist will be a big influence on my final pieces for Daredevil.

LeRoy Neiman:
Possibly the most well known painting to come from boxing is LeRoy Neiman's painting from Rocky 3

Neiman's painting style is really quite abstract and focuses a lot of bright block colours. His work reminds me more of graphic design kind of work and I'm not overly keen on his work. I think his use of energy through colour is very strong and technically done and I like the background on the Tyson vs Spinks piece but overall I'm not too interested in this kind of work.

Richard T. Slone:
Slone is predominantly a portrait artist who has produced a share of work related to sports.

The general style of Slone's artwork seems to work from the same template each time. His backgrounds are plain block colours, textured and with some detailing mostly painted out. Then the figures themselves are painted under a filter of the background colour. What I like about his work is he uses the background to enforce motion as opposed to the figure itself. The background and surroundings of the figure have energy painted around them to express impact and motion. I will not use this in my work however for this reason, it looks like comic book impacts. I'm trying to pull the comic book characters away from their format so having a burst of colour coming from a punch I think brings the comic book notion too much into play. Personally in regards to the paintings themselves, I think the blue one is the weakest of the three, the background colour doesn't really match the figures like the other two, I am likely to use these colour schemes in my own work.


1970's New York:

Suzanne Flamis

Leland Bobbe 

James Nares

South Bronx
Robert Ronan

1970s New York is dirty and gritty, filled with graffiti and vandalism. Crime was very common from petty crime to heinous crime, people would get mugged regularly and the subways were a danger of rapes and robbery. The windows were battered, smashed or boarded up and there were homeless people along the streets. Times Square was infested by prostitution and drug dealers working out in the open and most buildings in the area became vacant.
Etan Patz is the child pictured in the fourth image who disappeared in the late 70s. Patz is known as a missing child from the exposure his picture got ranging from milk cartons to billboards. This image is significant with New York in the 70s because of the crime and the media took to it. A similar case in Britain is the disappearance of Madeline McCann and how that has become well known for grim reason.