How the Mets, Islanders, and the Grit of NY Sports Shape the Way I Create

I’ve been making art my whole life. And I can draw a direct line, no pun intended, between how I approach a blank canvas and the years I spent watching New York teams do things to my nervous system that probably should have been covered under a medical plan.

 

Two teams, though, have left the deepest marks. The New York Mets and the New York Islanders. Not the glamour franchises. Not the dynasties with the luxury boxes and the celebrity sightings. The ones that make you work for it. The ones that remind you, every single season, that loving something doesn’t mean it will love you back the same way.

 

And honestly? Those are exactly the teams that make you a better artist.

 

Let’s start with the colors, because with the Mets, you have to start with the colors.

 

The Mets wear Dodger blue and Giant orange. Think about that for a second. When the Dodgers and Giants abandoned New York for California in 1957, the city was devastated. The National League was gone. So when the Mets arrived in 1962, they showed up wearing the colors of both departed teams as if to say, “We remember. We haven’t forgotten. Also, we’re going to lose 120 games this year, but the thought is there.”

 

That is either the most poetic branding decision in sports history or the most passive-aggressive jersey ever assembled. Possibly both. Either way, it works. The blue and orange has become one of the most recognizable color combinations in all of sports, and it carries with it this remarkable emotional weight, a whole city’s baseball grief and resilience stitched into every uniform.

 

That’s what I think about when I’m working on a color palette. Color doesn’t just look like something. It means something. It carries history. It tells a story before anyone reads a single word. The Mets’ blue and orange taught me that before I ever cracked open a book on color theory.

 

And then there’s the team itself. The ’86 Mets. If you weren’t there, you’ve heard the stories. If you were there, you’ve probably told the stories, at length, to people who didn’t ask. That team was brilliant and chaotic and just a little bit feral. Doc Gooden on the mound, Darryl Strawberry at the plate, Mookie Wilson rolling that ball through Buckner’s legs in what is still the most dramatic moment in Mets history and also, depending on who you ask, New England history. The comeback in Game 6 shouldn’t have happened. It happened anyway. That’s a Mets thing.

 

Being a Mets fan is essentially signing a consent form for emotional damage, and then renewing it every spring with genuine optimism. There’s something almost noble about it. You know what’s probably coming. You show up anyway. You believe anyway. And every few years, something actually beautiful happens, and you remember exactly why you do this.

 

That kind of stubborn, irrational hope is something I try to build into every piece of art I create. The willingness to commit fully to something even when the outcome is uncertain. The refusal to play it safe just because playing it safe is easier. Great art and a Mets pennant race have more in common than people realize.

 

Now let’s talk about the New York Islanders, because they don’t get nearly enough credit for what they were and what they represent.

 

From 1980 to 1983, the New York Islanders won four consecutive Stanley Cup championships. Four. In a row. That’s a dynasty. That’s one of the greatest runs in professional hockey history. Denis Potvin, Mike Bossy, Bryan Trottier, Billy Smith in goal doing things that would probably be illegal under today’s goaltending rules. That team was exceptional.

 

And yet, somehow, the Islanders have always existed in the shadow of the Rangers in terms of mainstream New York attention. The Rangers play at Madison Square Garden, which is famously “The World’s Most Famous Arena,” a title the Garden gave itself, which is very New York. The Islanders played at Nassau Coliseum out on Long Island, a building that had all the architectural ambiance of a large municipal parking garage but an atmosphere that was absolutely ferocious. If you’ve talked to anyone who was at those Cup runs, they’ll tell you the Coliseum rocked in a way that very few buildings in sports ever have.

 

That chip on the shoulder, that “we know what we did even if you’re not paying full attention” energy, that’s something I connect with as a creative person. You don’t always get the recognition immediately. The work is still good. The work still matters. Keep doing it.

 

The Islanders also teach you something essential about resilience and reinvention. After the dynasty, there were lean years. Long, painful, character-building lean years. There was the move to the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, which made geographical sense to approximately no one on Long Island. There was the return to a renovated UBS Arena at Belmont Park, which genuinely feels like the organization finding its footing again. As a franchise story, it’s messy and complicated and full of wrong turns, which sounds less like a sports team and more like a career in the arts.

 

The Islanders, in their best moments, play a brand of hockey that is physically demanding, structured, and relentless. Not always flashy. Not always the most aesthetically thrilling to a casual observer. But effective in a way that accumulates over time. That’s a creative philosophy. Not every piece needs to announce itself loudly. Some work just builds, layer by layer, until you step back and realize something real has been made.

 

The Yankees, obviously, are the visual gold standard of sports iconography. Pinstripes and that interlocking NY logo have been communicating power and tradition for over a century. Ruth, DiMaggio, Jeter. That uniform isn’t just fabric. It’s a compressed archive of American sports history, and studying it teaches you what it means for a brand to carry genuine weight.

 

The Rangers’ 1994 Stanley Cup run ended 54 years of suffering and gave the city a collective emotional release that probably registered on seismographs. Later on, Henrik was pretty amazing.

The Knicks and Madison Square Garden have produced some of the most iconic images in basketball, Willis Reed walking out of that tunnel, Patrick Ewing willing that team through the ’90s. Now, we have Brunson.

The Giants won two Super Bowls against the undefeated Patriots with two of the most improbable plays anyone has ever seen. The OBJ era was pretty wild.

And the Jets, bless them, are essentially a masterclass in hope as a spiritual discipline. There is no team on earth that does more with less fan reward than the Jets, and their fans show up anyway. That’s devotion. That’s art school with a worse cafeteria.

 

Every piece of sports art I create starts with the same question I’d ask about a great game: what’s the story, and who are we rooting for?

 

It’s not enough to draw a technically accurate portrait of a player. The pose has to carry something. The composition has to have momentum. You have to feel like something is about to happen, or just happened, or is hanging in the balance entirely. The Mets taught me that. The Islanders reinforced it. New York in general made it non-negotiable.

 

The colors have to hit the way a crowd goes loud in the bottom of the ninth. The line work has to be confident even when the subject is complicated, because hesitation shows in a line the same way it shows in a shortstop who takes half a second too long to decide. You commit to the stroke. You commit to the shot. You commit to the piece.

 

There’s also a volume of visual history here that never stops being useful. These teams have produced images, moments, and personalities that are burned into the collective memory of this city. A single moment, captured at the right angle with the right energy, can outlast the event itself by decades. That’s the whole point. That’s the job.

 

New York doesn’t let you get precious about your work. The city will tell you whether something is good in a way that is direct and immediate and does not particularly care about your feelings. Sports in this city work exactly the same way. You perform, or you hear about it. That accountability, uncomfortable as it sometimes is, makes the work better.

 

That’s what I try and bring as a sports artist. The Mets fan’s stubborn belief that this time it’ll be different. The Islanders fan’s understanding that the work speaks for itself even when the spotlight is pointed somewhere else. The New Yorker’s absolute refusal to phone it in.

 

Somebody’s always watching. And they definitely have opinions.