For this project it was based on my interpretation of the book titled "Hoops". It is about the life of a harlem basketball player wanting to go pro in the era of 80's. I annotated and read and using my notes I turned it into an artwork that tries to represent those themes.
This is the drawing
This is my explanation to my work
Hoops artwork artist statement
The key idea in the creation of the artwork was to show what someone like Lonnie would have to live through. But it does show some ideas that are specific to only Lonnie, for example, the house that has Lonnie's mother telling him to throw out a teabag. My artwork tries to portray what the neighborhood of Harlem could look like. Every speech bubble shown has textual evidence from the text. The whole artwork is supposed to piece together different elements from the story and make on big picture representing what I think the main theme is.
Now to move on to a more in detail rundown of the artwork I will explain individual parts of the artwork. The coach in the artwork has the text that says: easy shots Lonnie, represents coach Cal motivates Lonnie throughout the book. Behind where Lonnie is shooting has a non-visible kid telling Lonnie he doesn't know basketball that info is found on the last page. On found page 128 it shows Mary-ann pressuring Lonnie into confessing love for her it is represented in the second from the right house. The element of Lonnie's mother telling him to clean up is also shown on the right house, the evidence of those words our on-page 4 of the book. The house on the left has someone talking about magic, this is the character of Tomkins being compared to the player Magic Johnson(found throughout the end). The final house has Ox mourning after he lost his bird friend Sparrow it shows the kind of problems happening in Lonnies’s life(this part is found on page 116). In the middle, it shows Lonnie shooting trying to tell himself to get things out of his head.
In conclusion, my main theme portrayed in the artwork was Lonnie trying to be able to play his game, but all of the problems and difficulties outside of basketball could be holding him back. I also incorporated some of the inhale goals of finding character's motives, the people in the speech bubble represent motives just not necessarily what the text says. That is what I did in my work and I hope that in the future of doing projects like this I can try to get a better image of what the setting and characters look like.
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