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LeRoy Neiman, the painter and sketch artist, has died aged 91. He was best known for evoking the kinetic energy of the world's biggest sporting and leisure events with bright quick strokes.
Neiman was a contributing artist at Playboy magazine for many years and official painter of five Olympics. His publicist confirmed his death on Wednesday.
Neiman enthralled audiences with instant renditions of what he observed. In 1972 he sketched the world chess tournament between Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer in Reykjavik, Iceland, for a live television audience.
He produced live drawings of the Olympics for TV and was the official computer artist of the Super Bowl for CBS.
"It's been fun. I've had a lucky life," Neiman said in a June 2008 interview. "I've zeroed in on what you would call action and excellence ... Everybody who does anything to try to succeed has to give the best of themselves and art has made me pull the best out of myself."
Neiman's paintings, many executed in household enamel paints that allowed the artist his fast-moving strokes, are an explosion in reds, blues, pinks, greens and yellows of pure kinetic energy.
He has been described as an American impressionist but preferred to think of himself simply as an American artist. "I don't know if I'm an impressionist or an expressionist. You can call me an American first ... (but) I've been labelled doing neimanism, so that's what it is, I guess."
He worked in many media, producing thousands of etchings, lithographs and silkscreen prints known as serigraphy.
But his critics said Neiman's forays into the commercial world minimized him as a serious artist. At Playboy, for example, he created Femlin, the well-endowed nude that has graced the magazine's Party Jokes page since 1957.
Neiman shrugged off such criticism. "I can easily ignore my detractors and feel the people who respond favourably," he said.
"For an artist, watching a [Joe] Namath throw a football or a Willie Mays hit a baseball is an experience far more overpowering than painting a beautiful woman or leading political figure."
With his sketchbook and pencil, trademark handlebar moustache and slicked back hair, Neiman was instantly recognisable. At a New York Jets game at Shea Stadium in 1975 fans yelled "Put LeRoy in" when the play wasn't going their way.
Neiman's decades-long association with Playboy began in 1953 following a chance meeting with Hugh Hefner. It was the start of what he called "the good life" and inspiration for much of his future work. He regularly contributed to the magazine's Man at His Leisure feature, which took him to such places as the Grand National steeplechase and Ascot in England, the Cannes film festival in France and the Monaco grand prix.
Neiman was a self-described workaholic who seldom took vacations and had no hobbies. He worked daily in his New York City home studio at the Hotel des Artistes near Central Park that he shared with his wife of more than 50 years, Janet.
Neiman was also a portraitist who captured some of the world's most iconic figures, Frank Sinatra and Babe Ruth among them, in a style that conveyed their public image. "I am less concerned with how people look when they wake," he said. "A person's public presence reflects his own efforts at image development."
He painted Muhammad Ali many times over 15 years of the prizefighter's professional life, to the extent there is a LeRoy Neiman Gallery at the Muhammad Ali Centre in Louisville, Kentucky.
