This is a painting that embraced so many interests: my lifelong love of women’s sports, painting with knives, and echoing the styles I liked when I was growing up. While my foundation leans more to the realism side of representational art, I also harbor a desire to wield painting knives with bold colors to also feed the impressionistic musae of my inspiration. I also love it when I can feed my women-sports-loving side that I’ve long been so passionate about.

This painting is almost exclusively knife work with just a few lines of brushwork to deal with details too fine for blades. It’s also mostly heavy body acrylics which, as I’ve outlined elsewhere, dry so quickly on my palette that I’m pushed to paint quickly and with commitment. Fun times.

Unfortunately, practice is about all I can claim with this image as I don’t have the rights to the reference photo to do more. Sadly, most sports photos are rights managed (often with no mention of artist reproduction licensing — grrrr), and as a result, I don’t have nearly the access I’d like to do more of these (hey…artist gotta try to make a living). So, as much as I enjoy the general subject matter, this is going to be an uncommon appearance — hopefully just for now. It was fun, and since I can’t sell it or anything, I actually get to enjoy it hanging on my own walls.

(Disclaimer: Neither Alex Morgan, US Soccer, nor the original photographer, have any connection or endorsement with this work. It was produced under “fair use” which allows artists to produce creative works for autodidactic purpose to improve their craft.)