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The national artist
So, what about that art? Pittsburgh-based artist Tom Mosser, a former Pittsburgh Pirates mascot who’s renowned in the art world for his ambidextrous style of drawing and painting, contributed 30 pieces to Amway. The one which might garner the most attention is his Dwight Howard drawing (slide 7) that serves as an ode to Italian artist Leonardi Da Vinci’s famous Vitruvian Man sketch.
The piece, thought to have been accomplished by Da Vinci in 1487, is a study of a human’s physical proportions. Howard, the team star and as much of a physical specimen as there is in the League, was a natural fit.
“It just makes so much sense because of the human anatomy and the athlete anatomy,” Speca said. “It just works.”
It was Speca who came up with the idea. As she explained during the second of two phone interviews for this story, her thought for the drawing first came to her when she came across a Nike poster – familiar to many – of Michael Jordan palming a ball in each hand, arms extended. While watching a Magic game, Speca translated the idea to Howard replicating the position of the man in Da Vinci’s Vitruvian piece.
There was one problem – Howard’s body isn’t proportional. “The challenge with him is that his head is a little small for his body,” Mosser said by phone.
He feared that drawing Howard true to his proportions would create a distraction for casual viewers, whose attention to the piece, overall, might be disrupted by noticing Howard’s smaller noggin. So, he took what he called artistic liberty to refine Howard.
“Those are the kinds of things you have to do with artwork,” Mosser explained. “If you see a photo of an athlete, it was photographed. There’s no question if the athlete has an unusual expression on his face or if he looks odd. But if you do a representational piece of artwork and something looks a little funky, then your artwork is going to be funky, too.”
Mosser’s loop technique, the backbone of Howard’s Vitruvian, also lives in his other drawings, which includes 15 pieces representing current and former players for the Magic (slide 5). Look at any of the drawings and it’s apparent how a sketch is built on quick, circular motions. Mosser said he adopted the technique when he was a kid, since he enjoyed drawing in circles.
But the quick motions make sense in other ways. For one, they’re economical. He was constantly working on deadlines for the Amway project, which meant he had to complete the player sketches in a relatively brief time – roughly 10 hours each. Mosser employed his ambidextrous approach by using both hands to work one piece for about 30 minutes, then moving on to the next.
“Working on so many pieces, you want them to mach,” he said. “Because there’s a deadline, I want to be able to finish them at the same time, or in groups. Sometimes I would do groups of four or five because I would get them to the framer. They had deadlines to get these things framed.”
Unsurprisingly, he advocates the emergence of art in sports venues. It opens up his range of potential projects, sure. But, in his mind, there is another factor at play.
“They’re spending millions of dollars on the best plumbing and the best wood and the best carpeting and the fixtures,” Mosser said. “It’s nice to spend money on fine art, too.”
The Orlando artists
The heart of Amway’s artwork is its connection with Amway’s surrounding area, just as Speca had intended. A core ingredient of Central Florida art is the remembrance of the Highwaymen, a group of 26 black artists from the 1950s and ’60s who traveled throughout the area to sell their works door-to-door.
Roy McLendon, one of the original Highwaymen, has 11 paintings depicting seascapes, swamps, ponds, sunsets and landscapes throughout Central Florida. All his work was done on a parquet floor in reference to the arena’s basketball influence (slides 10, 12).
Another local artist, Larry Moore, contributed five pieces, although four of them were grouped to create one depiction of a set of rooftops in Orlando (slide 14). The fifth piece shows a night scene downtown (slide 13).
“It’s not a literal painting of downtown,” Moore said by phone. He wanted to communicate the excitement of downtown without making it too static. Therefore, he created lots of angles, which is why the buildings are slanted. A loose, “drippy” nature was also necessary, he said. He accomplished that by using gesso, a white binding material, on a wooden box and then painting, sometimes slinging, gobs of paint at it to define its texture. “I used heavy amounts of paint because I wanted it to have energy,” Moore said of the 4′ x 7′ piece.
