Dimensions: 62x91cm
Painted: 2001
Materials: Acrylic on MDF board
Private collection
The story behind King of Dirt
Back to BMX. Of course.
Around 2000, dirt jumping was going somewhere new, and backflip variations like this one were what very few riders on the planet could actually pull. TJ Lavin was one of the first real stars of it, with more tricks than most riders knew existed. When this photo turned up in Ride BMX, Bert Ernie decided on the spot that it was getting painted.
The photographer had used a wide-angle lens, and the fisheye bend in it gave the game away. Too obviously a photograph. By then the magazine pages were going through a scanner and into Photoshop 5, so he straightened the distortion out on screen before drawing it up in pencil on MDF. His view was that a painter should use whatever tools he’s got, and he had a computer. The result sits closer to what you’d see standing there: the Pier 17 grandstand, the crowd, the rider upside down overhead.
He also gave it a proper sky. In the magazine it’s a washed-out white glare. Here it’s a flat, hard blue, and the rider hangs in it like he’s been pinned there. Best decision in the painting.
The crowd was the hard part. Hundreds of people stacked over several levels, each needing enough detail to read as a person but not so much that anyone steals the show. Mostly it works. A few faces down the front have gone a bit cartoonish, and one or two look faintly alarmed, which at a backflip contest is fair enough.
The rider himself is very good. Gloves, helmet, the sponsor logos on his jersey, the twist of the body mid-flip, all of it handled with care.
Then, years later, an email out of nowhere. The man in the painting was asking about it. Bert Ernie took it out of its frame and fixed a scratch in the sky, ready to go. It never went. Shipping to the USA would have cost close to a thousand dollars, and that was most likely the end of it.
No hard feelings, he says. Just one of those things. It’s the closest any of these came to finding the right home.
Source image: Ride BMX, October 2000
Source image of realism painting King of Dirt
Detail views of realism painting King of Dirt
