Rosslyn Basketball

We had just returned from furlough and I glanced out the hall window of our apartment and saw some students playing basketball. I videotaped their game. Then I began to draw the scene and make color notes around the edges of the drawing as I saw the old masters had done. This was the second painting I did from sketches. When I had the composition I right I traced a frame of the basketball game and copied it into my drawing. The patterns on the top and bottom are my attempt to say that the scene is in Africa. The perspective and scale of the basketball court was a real challenge since there was no clue as to how it should recede except my own feeling about it. A couple years later you could no longer see the mountains in the distance because there were more cars in Nairobi and you couldn't see the basketball court because a tree had grown up that fast. Just behind the fence is an unused coffee field from which people would sneak in to steal stuff from the classrooms.