In the summer of 2021 I was introduced to NY Rangers defenseman (not yet Captain) Jacob Trouba. One night over a fried Peking duck, he asked if he could come to my Brooklyn studio to work on a painting he had in mind for his wife Kelly. “Something sentimental.”

I said, “ok” as long as he “promised not to be annoying”.

The following day we walked across the Brooklyn Bridge to my studio. I set him up on a wall in the corner with some supplies and he went to work. I looked over occasionally, mostly to make sure he wasn’t wasting my expensive pigments.

His initial drawing on the canvas was surprisingly pretty good. He also kept perfectly balanced form while painting. I had engaged in and witnessed others develop the bad habit of contorting the body and wrenching the neck in all different directions to understand forms in space and on the canvas. Jacob had both a good drawing hand and a posture that would easily translate into respect for the picture plane. There was promise.

I have had two of the best mentors to ever hold that position in my art life and I have mercilessly attempted to bleed them dry of their vast well of knowledge. Fortunately for them, their genius is bottomless. I felt at the time that I owed the art universe some reciprocation. Over the course of that summer I found myself becoming Jacob’s mentor.

Throughout the course of the next couple of years when Jacob wasn’t on the road, we talked a lot about painters and painting. One night Yves Klein came up in conversation and I saw his face light up. The idea of making marks with the body fascinated him and seemed a possible way to merge his art identity with his hockey identity. “Klein was the painter but used his models’ bodies to make marks. What if I were both?”

The idea then spent a considerable amount of time in the ether. There were so many questions about execution, materials and concerns about keeping him free from harm that the idea kept getting smote. In the beginning of the summer of 2023 his morning training skates were followed by more rounds of golf than usual. In my mind, I was failing the mentor test. Don’t extinguish a flame.

So, I reconfigured the studio, texted Jacob that we were ready to go and within an hour he was suited up, drenched in paint and crashing into a canvas-covered mattress on my studio wall.

The rest is Jacob’s story to tell. I am proud of what he is accomplishing as an artist and to be helping a person with such a generous heart and spirit. To date his paintings and prints have raised over $150,000 for various charities and he recently exhibited at Harper’s Gallery in Chelsea.

In addition to Jacob’s solo work where I have helped him navigate materials and execution, we collaborated on a few paintings which I present on my site here.

To see Jacob’s work and order prints please visit his website jacobtroubaart.com and watch him on Amazon Prime “Face-off” Inside the NHL, episode 4.