interior · 2022
Highland Court
The challenge
The paintable surface is not a wall so much as what is left of one. A row of tall windows runs the length of the court at eye level, so the composition had to work around fixed gaps rather than across a clear span, and every figure had to sit where the glass is not.
Figures in grayscale, jerseys in red, and nothing else. Holding the palette to a single color does two jobs on a court: it stops a busy wall competing with the game in front of it, and it makes the red read from anywhere in the room.
The drawing is photo-real and the ground behind it is not. Players come out of flat black and dissolve back into it, so the composition needs no edges and no frame, and it can stop wherever a window starts.
Private courts have become a recurring commission rather than a one off. Rudy Gobert’s came first, and GOATS followed in Utah Valley, nine portraits wrapping a court and its golf room.
