Saturday, June 15, 2013

It Never Happened: Diego Corrales vs. Arturo Gatti





It's been awhile, Howlers, but here I be with my latest artistic offering, a comic book-style rendering of a dream fight I've often thrown about in my own melon, Diego "Chico" Corrales vs. Arturo "Thunder" Gatti.

Now, this is something I've been planning for well over a year and my intention was to do a piece I could chronicle in the same style I did my previous (and only other, up to this point) dopey music video for the design I did for my pal, Chris Casso's band, Stereo Transmitted Disease (http://www.coyoteduran.com/2010/09/blog-post.html). And indeed I did but the catalyst for moving this project along was one Anson Wainwright, one of my colleagues at www.maxboxing.com. "Dancin' Anson" also happens to write for The Ring magazine's website, www.ringtv.com, and proposed a continuation to an article he penned for Maxboxing titled, "They Never Happened" (http://www.maxboxing.com/news/max-boxing-news/they-never-happened). This particular piece listed 13 fights that never came off for one reason or another and were broken down by renowned boxing matchmakers, Ron Katz (of Star Boxing), Robert Diaz (of Golden Boy Promotions) and Brad Goodman (of Top Rank Promotions).




In Anson's sequel (also edited by Yours Truly), he laid out 10 more fantasy bouts for our speculative approval and one just happened to be Corrales vs. Gatti. When Anson asked me to create a piece celebrating this fight, I jumped at the chance (well...I jumped at it, then started one, then threw it out because I didn't dig where it was going, then jumped again on the one that stuck).

This time, I changed my original idea (an acrylic rendering. Panic not - or panic. It's up to you - I would really like to try this again in an acrylic painting) and went for something fully and boldly inked (done up with my trusty Microns!) like my rendition of Sergio Martinez vs. Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. (http://www.coyoteduran.com/2012/09/sergio-martinez-vs-julio-cesar-chavez.html). However, I wanted to really bold it up and since I haven't played around with my Prismacolor watercolor pencils for awhile, I thought this would be a good opportunity to goof off and have some fun (and I needed a little fun. I've been a little down in the dumps lately and this was a great way to let my hair down, so to speak. Be risky. Be dangerous...yeah, right. I'm about as dangerous as an ice cream sandwich).

So what you have here, my excellent Howlers, is the inked drawing of one of the greatest fights we've never seen as well as the finished Prismacolor version. It isn't perfect nor is it meant to be photorealistic. It's just a fun little piece I needed to fire up and when it was all done, I saw (and it's just me) a little Asian influence as well as a bit of respect to one Michael Allred, one of my all-time  comic book influences.

Moreso, I finished this on June 10, right about the midway point between the anniversaries of both fighters' very untimely deaths (Corrales passed away on May 7, 2007 at the age of 29 and Gatti passed on July 11, 2009 at 37).

(Oh, and I'll have a separate blog post featuring the start-to-finish art. It's to the tune of Saliva's "Badass"! How awful could it be?)

And I wouldn't mind knowing what you think of this fight, Howlers. If you're fight aficionados, how do you see "Chico" vs. "Thunder" playing out? You can comment on Facebook right below this blog post or hit me up on the Twitter (@CoyoteDuran)!

Thanks for sitting through the rant and enjoy!


No comments:

Post a Comment