King of dirt

The story behind King of Dirt

BMX dirt jumping was at a turning point around 2000. Backflip variations like the one captured here were next level — very few riders in the world could pull them off. TJ Lavin was one of the earliest superstars of the discipline and had an astonishing range of tricks. When this image appeared in Ride BMX magazine it was immediately clear it had to be painted.

The source photograph was shot with a wide-angle lens that produced dramatic fisheye distortion — too obviously photographic for the purpose. By this point the magazines were being scanned into a computer and viewed in Photoshop 5, which had the tools to correct lens distortion before the image was transferred to MDF board as a pencil drawing. The goal was always to use every available tool to be the best painter possible. The correction brought the perspective closer to what the eye would actually see standing at that spot — the Pier 17 grandstand, the crowd, the sky, all resolved into something more honest than the lens had recorded.

The crowd itself was one of the most technically demanding parts of the painting. Hundreds of individual figures packed across multiple levels, each one requiring enough detail to read as a person without becoming the focus.
Years later an email arrived out of the blue — the subject of the painting making enquiries. The painting was taken out of its frame and the blue sky repaired where it had been scratched. Ultimately the sale didn’t happen, most likely because shipping to the USA would have cost close to a thousand dollars. No hard feelings. Just one of those things.

Source image: Ride BMX — October 2000

Source image of realism painting King of Dirt

Detail views of realism painting King of Dirt