The Emerald City Route Artist

High Above this Haunted City

My love of football got a resurgence over the last two years—kind of out of nowhere. I used to love it back in the day but I haven’t watched since the aughts.

The story of how the 2025 season became part of the story is a story for another day, but it had to do with a lot of numbers, and a lot of Jacksons—especially number 11, JSN.

This painting was metallic emerald green for the longest time and I never got inspired to paint over it until now.  My accents would be yellow and rose and the colors applied messily with a pallet knife seemed to be making letters, Es, maybe a V in the corner.

Vs make me think Jackson is giving me a peace sign. 

I flipped the canvas around and now the yellow in the corner looked like a football player wearing the number 11. Jackson from the story for another day.

So I taped over him to protect him while I continued to paint. 

After applying the first layer of pink there was way too much of it so I layered over it with a chromatic black. There was a big blob of black around the top corner that was not working for me so I scraped a bunch of lines in it until I eventually noticed it looked like a stadium. 

I removed the tape from number 11 and the separation around him from the rest of the painting made it feel like he was running through a portal to the stadium glowing green in the sky atop the Emerald City. There always seems to be an Emerald City.

The obsession with football wasn’t out of nowhere. Jackson wanted to experience winning a Super Bowl, and he did. 

He wanted to make sure Mae was there to see it, and she was.