Running To Daylight

I love the New York Giants. Their stadium is pretty much centrally located within the New Jersey Meadowlands which gives me another reason why this project is near and dear to my heart. On a photo shoot in the area back in 2009 I stopped in the Vince Lombardi Service Area off the New Jersey Turnpike to finish out a roll of film. Behind the parking lot there's access to some pretty dense foxtails, with some creeks and nice views of the Hackensack River.

The image at the bottom here is my latest work, titled Vince II. It's meant to be the follow-up to another, larger, and presently unfinished work tentatively called Behind Vince Lombardi. Both of these works were painted from frames shot behind the service area. Lombardi, the man for whom the area is named, was a coach with the Giants before he was head coach of the Green Bay Packers, the tenure for which he is most know for.

Lombardi was an innovator, and was the offensive coordinator for the Giants in the mid to late 1950's. He developed new blocking techniques and other strategies, and coined the phrase "running to daylight" to describe how a running back should head towards open holes in the opponent's defense. This is significant to me, since I tend to employ the idea of running to daylight as a metaphor for how I have to seek out small windows of time in order to get in my studio as I slog through my busy life of job and family.

As I duck and dodge for the open holes, and run to daylight through the obstacles life throws in my way, I slowly churn out works like this:

Matthew Green, Vince II, 22" x 30", oil on canvas, 2013