Christian Podgorski: Bodybuilding Art

For as long as I can remember I have been drawing people. I never really had any interest in landscapes or still life, I just wanted to draw people. As a child I would draw my favorite comic book characters and wrestlers. As I grew older, teachers would encourage me to expand my subject matter or to try to draw in a different style but I was not interested. Nothing else holds the challenge of rendering a human being correctly. If you are drawing a tree and you get one leaf out of place it still looks like a tree, but if you are drawing a person and you get one feature out of place it no longer looks like that person. Now, working with the greats of the bodybuilding world, I have found the biggest challenge I could attempt in drawing the human form.

Early in my career I decided that I was going to draw sports figures. I have always been a sports fanatic and this seemed to be the perfect marriage of the two things I loved the most. I did some work for Beckett Publications and sold original artworks with a few different art brokers. Eventually I decided to go out on my own and I started a web site, MVPSportsArt.com. During this time I also began to embrace a more healthy lifestyle. I started buying some of the bodybuilding magazines and eventually checked out some of the bodybuilders websites. This is when I decided that I would create artworks featuring bodybuilders and make limited edition prints for them to sign and sell. I was convinced that this was a great idea but I had never drawn such intricate subjects and I had no connections in the industry. I created a couple of sample pieces that I could use to sell myself to the athletes but my first attempts to connect with them were unsuccessful. Eventually I got Shawn Ray to take a chance with me. Shawn is known in the bodybuilding industry as the athlete who has marketed himself better than any other. He saw in my work a product that was different than the regular photos that others were selling and we decided to create an artwork. This first piece was very successful and sold out quickly and allowed me to market myself further to other athletes.

I have since had the opportunity to work with some of the all time greats of bodybuilding. In addition to the two artworks I created for Shawn Ray, I have created two pieces for Ronnie Coleman. My work is featured on the cover of Frank Zane’s magazine Building the body. This piece and another signed by Frank will be available soon after the Arnold classic. In addition to these I have also created artworks for Rich Gaspari and Lee Priest, and I will soon be creating a new piece for Darrem Charles.

I have just recently begun to expand my subjects to include fitness, figure, and women’s bodybuilding. I did the first of these with fitness star Mindi O’Brien. I created this piece from the excellent photos of JC Lopez here at Hard Fitness. Prints of this artwork are available now on Mindi’s website www.Mindiobrien.com

In the future I hope to create more artworks from JC’s awesome photos and show them here. In addition to Hard Fitness see more of my work at MVPSportsArt.com. Email me and let me know if there is an athlete that you would like to see me draw.

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