Portrait of Sugar Ray Robinson 2026 ink wash on handmade paper 30” X 22”
Langston Hughes wrote “I look at my own body with eyes no longer blind, and I see that my own hands can make the world that’s in my mind.” Robinson’s hands made a different kind of world, one built on rhythm, on the heart knowing what the mind cannot plan. He said it himself: “Rhythm is everything in boxing. Every move you make starts with your heart, and that’s in rhythm or you’re in trouble.”
He lived a few blocks from where I did. His mother and sister were neighbors on my block. He was kind to me as a child. I didn’t know then that I was living near the greatest of all time. The drips in this painting are not decoration. They are sweat, blood, the body spending itself completely. I know it now, and this is how I say it.
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