Endzone

Finally a new painting. This one took me a few months, but I'm generally pleased with how it turned out. It's an improvement on an earlier painting I did in college called "No 'I' in 'Team'." The local high school was having its homecoming parade with cheerleaders riding a fire truck and the entire football team riding along in military trucks of some kind. Seeing that really cemented the link between sports and the military for me. Luckily, I had a camera on me and snapped a few photos, but it's kind of hard to tell in the painting exactly what's going in. It should be clearer here.

But honestly, sports and the military are disturbingly similar:
1. They're both geared toward young men and are the source of many of the games boys play as kids.
2. They're both socially acceptable outlets of aggression that channel violence toward a threatening "other" (a rival team vs. foreigners).
3. Both require uniforms, physical conditioning, and training that breaks down the individual identity and replaces it with the team mentality.
4. Both nurture a tribal sense of pride and belonging (sports fans vs. patriotism).
5. Both are enormous businesses with huge marketing and recruitment campaigns on high schools and colleges.
6. Both are cultural rites of passage into adulthood.

Now don't get me wrong. Sports and the military aren't necessary bad. Sports can help build confidence and teach teamwork and in events such as the Olympics, entire countries can come together and try to set aside political and cultural differences to play a few games. In a perfect world, armies and warfare wouldn't be needed, but until we get there, militaries are sadly necessary in this world.

But you can't deny that much of the behavior and culture these two create mirror one another. They're engrained into our culture and have a huge hand in molding what kind of people we are.

The title is borrowed from a Don DeLillo novel which also explores these themes.