I've been teaching art at St. Patrick's for a while now. Long enough that the room feels like mine in the way that only happens when you've spent years inside a space, rearranging it, filling it, learning its light. And somewhere recently I stopped and looked around and realized that not one piece of art on those walls was made by me.
That's a strange thing to notice. An art teacher with no art in his own room.
It's not that I haven't made things. The studio at home is full of work. There are projects in various states of becoming spread across every surface I own. I make things constantly. But somehow none of it ever made it to school. The walls there belong to students, to examples, to posters and process work and the good chaos of a working classroom. My own hand was nowhere in it.
I've been thinking about leaving this place. Not dramatically, not tomorrow, but the coaching chapter is already closed and the rest will follow in May. And when I started thinking about what I'd want to leave behind, the walls came to mind. Specifically, those cabinet doors and classroom doors in the art room that are just surfaces right now. Wood waiting.
So, this is what I decided to do.
Over my years coaching cross country at St. Patrick's, seven athletes medaled at the state level. I'm going to paint a large-scale head and shoulders portrait of each one, directly onto those doors. Each portrait will be rendered in a different art historical style. Not randomly assigned, but intentionally matched. The style to the person. The visual language to the story. Seven athletes. Seven artists. Shepard Fairey, Alphonse Mucha, Chuck Close (maybe), Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Banksy, Jean-Michel Basquiat.
It is important to note that the portraits will carry the style of each artist selected but may not be the same exact process. Shephard Fairey and Warhol both used silkscreen printing almost always. I am still debating on if I will silkscreen all or part of these. Space and time limitations may insist that I change up process on some of them. We will see as I move along.
Each portrait will carry a QR code. Scan it and you'll find the athlete's story, the reasoning behind the style match, and the process behind the painting. Art history, athletic achievement, and something more personal than either, all in one place. The series will live on those walls long after I'm gone.
Coltan H reference portrait from iPhone
But here's the thing I've been sitting with since I started planning this. As a coach, I've never believed that the fastest athletes are necessarily the most important ones. I mean that in a way that isn't just a nice thing to say. Often, the scoreboard lies. I have watched kids who never came close to a podium hold entire teams together in ways that don't show up in any results. The one who made everyone laugh on the worst bus ride home. The one who finished last in practice and never once complained, and whose presence in that last place was the thing that made the fastest kids push harder. The one who stayed beside an injured teammate during a race he could have walked away from, because that's just who he was.
Speed is one thing. What people carry is another. I like the student-athletes to focus on just being a good human with not only passion but compassion, humility and a genuine interest on serving the needs of their fellow humans.
So building this series around state medalists felt, from a coaching perspective, like exactly the wrong frame. Like I was honoring the wrong things. It nagged at me.
But I made this selection as an artist, not as a coach.
First attempt grid one from reference of Coltan-Andy Warhol style
As an artist I needed a series with a logic that wasn't personal. Something small and cohesive with a criterion that existed outside my own feelings about any individual kid. If I tried to paint the athletes I thought contributed most, I'd be making calls that are intimate and potentially painful in ways I don't have the right to make. The state medalist designation is clean and external. It took the judgment out of my hands.
And what I've come to understand is that the criteria gets someone into the room, but the art says the true thing. Those aren't the same act.
The first portrait I'm working on is being done in the style of Shepard Fairey, the artist behind the Obama Hope poster. The athlete I've chosen for it has a senior photograph that carries the same quality as that image, the upward gaze, the stillness, the sense that something has already been decided inside the person before the picture was ever taken. It's the right face for that treatment.
Even though he is a fast runner, his story has almost nothing to do with speed. He came into high school having already decided something most kids don't figure out until much later. That who you are capable of becoming is worth more than who you are right now.
Somewhere in those middle school years, quietly and without fanfare, he decided he was going to be a runner. He worked. Not dramatically. Just consistently, in the way that doesn't make a good story until later when you look back at it.
Dimitri reference from cropped senior pic
As a freshman he stepped in to run at district when our number one runner got sick. He ran well enough to qualify for state as an individual. And then he gave the bid away so his teammate could go instead and the team would have its best shot. Ugh, that is rough. It is very difficult for a freshman boy to qualify for State in any sport but cross is really tough. The team was runner-up that year at State.
He medaled almost every race his sophomore and junior years. His senior he led. Before every race, including the big meets where hundreds of athletes were gathered at the start line, he would gather all of the team in a circle and lead them in prayer. Not quietly, not apologetically. He just did it, and other kids circled in, and it became the thing that marked the beginning of every race.
He didn't start that tradition. That belonged to someone else, someone who will get his own portrait and his own story later in this series. But he picked it up and carried it, and that's its own kind of courage.
He's going to Park University to keep running.
The first door to be painted is ready
That's the story the Fairey portrait is going to carry. Not a medal. Not a finish time. Something harder to say in one word, which is probably why I'm still deciding between Endure, Serve, and Earned for the text that runs beneath his face the way Hope runs beneath Obama's.
That's the thing about this series that I didn't anticipate when I started planning it. I thought it was a project about honoring athletes. It turns out it's a project about how art gets to say what other forms of recognition can't. A trophy says you were fast. A portrait can say who you were.
Two substrates are primed and sanded. The references are in various stages of being finished. The Fairey image is ready, waiting on some newspaper clippings and ephemera from his family before I commit to the process. The Warhol reference is almost done in Photoshop. The Mucha is waiting on a better photo. The rest are in research, which is where the real thinking happens before any paint touches anything.
This is the first post in what will be a longer series. Each portrait will get its own write-up when the time comes. The athlete, the artist, the match, the process. I don't know exactly how long the whole thing will take. I'm not rushing it. These doors will outlast my time in that building, and that's worth getting right.
If this kind of thinking resonates with you, the idea that making is about more than output, that process carries meaning technique alone can't, Living by Making might be good company. It's my free weekly newsletter for serious makers who want to stay faithful to their work over the long haul. No hustle, no hacks. Just a quiet, steady place to think about how making shapes a life.
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Dimitri portrait for the door in the style of Shephard Fairey
The Rose That Knows It Will Fade