Acrylic, spray and paint marker on 30″ x 40″ canvas
At the time of this writing, Daniel Bryan is the most popular wrestler in the world. Born May 22, 1981, Bryan Danielson pursued his training directly after high school, first with Shawn Michaels and later with William Regal. Following a brief time with WWE’s developmental system in 2001, Danielson toured Japan with Pro Wrestling NOAH and New Japan Wrestling, before joining Ring of Honor, working the upstart promotion’s first ever show.
With Ring of Honor, Danielson had a notable feud with Austin Aries before winning the ROH World Championship in 2005 from James Gibson. As champion, he had many great rivalries against the likes of NOAH’s Naomichi Marufuji and Combat Zone Wrestling’s Chris Hero, as well as ROH’s own Samoa Joe and most importantly against Nigel McGuinness. Danielson and McGuinness’ bouts went around the world and to much notoriety. Following his loss of the title, he also had a great set of matches against Tyler Black, aka Seth Rollins, Colt Cabana and Adam Pearce, before having his final ROH match against his long-time rival Nigel McGuinness.
In 2009 he signed with WWE, where he started working under the name Daniel Bryan. He debuted as a part of the NXT show, being ‘mentored’ by The Miz, who he would go on to feud with before being released the following year amidst controversy. He spent a few months back on the Independent Circuit, renewing his rivalry with Adam Pearce, before returning to WWE as a part of John Cena’s team at SummerSlam. He won the United States Championship later that year from The Miz, before losing it in turn to Sheamus. In 2011 he won the Money in the Bank match, and later cashed in his title shot successfully against The Big Show. He would later lose the title to Sheamus at WrestleMania in 2012, where his ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ chants really took off with the live crowds.
He would then go on to have a series of notable matches against CM Punk, before teaming with Kane in the tag team division. Bryan and Kane, as Team Hell No, would go on to win the tag titles and hold them for 245 days. This lead to Bryan becoming more and more popular with the fans, and soon to a successful singles run, competing against Randy Orton. In the latter half of 2013, Bryan has become the top performer in all of wrestling. He is currently in the middle of a hot storyline seeing him squaring off against Orton, The Shield and the McMahon family, with crowds coming unglued when he won the WWE Championship before getting ‘screwed’ out of it by Triple H and Orton. He has proven again and again that hard work and determination pay off.
About the piece: Continuing my determination to be better, I worked and worked this piece until it felt right. I started with a black background, then added spray paint and some graffiti-ish symbols with paint marker. I then brought in the figure, with part of the background elements continuing into the shadows of the shirt. I then topped it off with some more paint marker swirls.
Hi Rob,
My name is Aditya and I’m a huge wrestling fan from India. I recently found some of your work on the internet while looking for some wrestling related artwork and I’ve become a big fan of your work. I think your initiative to paint every single pro wrestling world champion in history is extremely laudable and I try to do my bit to support you by promoting your work on the wrestling sites I visit. While I normally wouldn’t have sat and written this, this particular portrait really inspired me to do so. I think you should show this to somebody like Bryan or Brie Bella on twitter or something because I’m sure they’d really love to buy it from you. In my humble opinion, this is a masterpiece and your best work so far. I also really liked the ones you made of Edge and Bret Hart. Really looking forward to the Chris Jericho one whenever it comes out.
Keep up the good work and I wish you a ton of success in the future with these paintings and any other art that you create!
Thank you very much, Aditya! Your words mean a lot.