The Original Is Unfaithful To The Translation
How do you paint a memory? Perhaps even harder, how do you digitally paint a memory? I wanted to capture the moment I remember becoming a Cleveland Browns fan. The moment I first got up and yelled for them to pull through. The first moment of pure anguish I felt from a late-game interception and a missed field goal in overtime. The euphoria of a playoff win. And the first moments I saw the cold, grey, industrial palette of the Dawg Pound. The first moment I wished I was there with them all. Almost 30 years later, my wish would come true.
I’d been a Browns follower throughout the 1986 season, but on January 3rd 1987 the Browns took on The New York Jets at home at the old Cleveland Stadium. This playoff game, the ‘Marathon by the Lake’ had everything. The classic Browns lineup including Kosar, Brennan, Slaughter, Langhorne, Dixon and Minnifield on the corners, Fontenot and Mack in the backfield, and coach Schottenheimer calling it all on the sidelines. Missed field goals, critical interceptions, the Browns almost celebrating their way out of the game as the clocked counted down, double overtime, and of course, the incredible atmosphere that always comes with an icy home Browns game in Cleveland. The Browns would win, and go on to face Denver, again at home, where they’d tie the game to ‘The Drive’ in the dying seconds of the fourth quarter, and go on to lose in overtime. This was the first time I cried when they lost. It wouldn’t be the last.
I watched the game at my grandparents’ house in Cheltenham, England, on my own in their bedroom on an old, grainy black and white TV that had terrible reception, and I have very vivid memories of what that felt like to my 13 year old self. Over 30 years later, I now work for NBC, the channel who broadcast the game, I married into a Jets family, I go to at least one Browns home game a year, and I commute past the Jets’ stadium every day. I’ve used the dot matrix language of digital capability at the time to recreate what it felt like to watch, organized into thirty second increments of the game across 315 digital paintings.
