The Artist

New York Stars, courtesy of Gene Sanny

The other day I posted some WFL paintings I saw online by Gene Sanny.  Hoping to learn more I asked him why he started painting WFL teams.


I'll let Gene take it from here:

I painted the WFL teams because there just isn't really anything out there that I can buy to hang in my football room of the WFL. I started with the Americans, and looked at my wall space and realized I could fit all 12 1974 teams into the area below some of my bigger canvas portraits I painted of Joe Namath and Jim Otto... so I painted them all and framed them and now I can enjoy them whenever I want.

Birmingham Americans

Thanks to the internet I've been able to find old pictures that I can use for inspiration for the paintings.... when I was a kid, the first contact I had with the WFL was a letter in the letter section of football digest where the person asked if the magazine could post all the old logos of the WFL. I grew obsessed with that page as I had never heard of the league, and being both an artist and a huge football fan, I couldn't help but start drawing pics of what I thought the teams looked like. Of course the magazine was black and white, so my pictures were way off as far as color was concerned.

Later when I started to see actual team pictures, I was blown away by the Chicago Fire helmet. The rendition I did used the actual logo that was in the magazine, where it was a fire ball with the eyes and facemask below it... the real helmet was incredible with the flames going around the earhole.

Chicago Fire

Philadelphia Bell

To wrap up, my WFL fandom came full circle with the completion of my last WFL painting, the Philadelphia Bell.... I know all the colors are right, and when I look at the paintings I can feel good about them. An interesting note on the Bell painting is that King Corcoran's son Jimmy saw it and sought me out and we had a nice email conversation.

Great stuff Gene.  Keep up the great work.


To see more paintings by Gene check out his blog.

Southern California Sun