Behold! Alexsandr's other "We Are The Champions" painting

Did you think this would be a slow news week? Maybe an injury update here or a scouting report there, but overall an uneventful period before the semifinals. Well, you were wrong. From the Internet’s very own disreputable flea market emerges what might become the cultural moment of the hockey season.

(Are we building this up too much?)

Artist Aleksandr Reut has crafted Washington Capitals – We are the Champions!, an exquisite 40″ x 32″ oil painting on canvas. This inspired (yet absurdly premature) work of celebratory art and its partner piece are available for bid or purchase on eBay right now. Starting bid is only $5,000, so crack open those piggy banks.

A 50-something Ukranian ex-pat living in Harrisonburg, Virginia, Reut fills the daytime hours as an architect, but the muses compel him to high art. A decade-old profile from Harrisonburg’s Daily News-Record (reprinted here by brama.com) extols Reut’s passion for mixed media as a sculptor, but he tells me that it’s hockey that really inspires him.

“I used to play hockey myself,” Reut tells me by phone. ”When I moved to the U.S. twenty years ago, the Capitals were my only comfort zone. Finally, they are pretty close to the Stanley Cup.”

Close, I am quick to point out, is a distance still measured at one dozen wins. But Reut’s enthusiasm does not waver.

It’s important to understand that these are images of aspiration, not celebration. “I painted those two paintings right after their loss to the Montreal Canadiens [in the 2010 playoffs],” Reut says. “I called Ted Leonsis. He really liked the idea, but he thought it was kind of premature.”

Hell yes, but we dig it anyway.

Champions depicts the Washington Capitals in a medieval setting. As knights in solemn triumph having just slain hockey’s equivalent of St. George’s dragon, they gather to in court to receive Lord Stanley’s Cup from two… — well they’re dwarfs, aren’t they? Settling a nagging question, Reut tells me the little people are part of the painting’s dark-ages milieu and don’t represent anyone (*cough* Marcus Johansson *cough*).

There’s George McPhee in academician’s garb and Bruce Boudreau as a royal clergyman (“preaching and teaching, you know!” says Reut). King Ted Leonsis himself rides a horse with his flaxen wife by his side. The Knights of the Round Puck stand at far left. There’s Ovechkin, Green, Semin, Backstrom, Knuble, and Varlamov. And, oh yeah. The President and First Lady are there, too.

“You see Barack Obama and his wife standing behind the Stanley Cup,” Reut laughs across the line, “I didn’t know about the huge reception [for the Chicago Blackhawks] yet when I painted this.”

In the background are some  of D.C.’s most striking landmarks. The Capitol, the National Cathedral and Georgetown University sit atop the hills like the mythical Camelot — warmed by diffuse, Albionic sunshine.

In the world of Reut’s art, hockey and knighthood are one and the same. He cites for me Mike Green’s recent sacrifice and urges the team to institute the title Knight of the Year to “the most noble and courageous and handsome” player on the team. Reut nominates Green for the honor, and we second the motion.

Yes, this is exactly the kind of thing we should be avoiding right now. Caps fans already have a reputation as overeager and prone to self-congratulation. But this is not that. Full of humor and fun and good will, this painting embodies what we love about each other and the team that we cheer on. This is precisely the kind of attitude that our community needs. So go put a bid in. You’ll have a beautiful painting to hang in your den and a great story to tell.

But please: lock it in a dark room for a couple months first.

More Art from Alex Reut

Thanks to @itallfallsdwn for unearthing this gem for everyone.

Appendices compiled by Ian Oland.

Posting fan art is one of our favorite features on RMNB.  It’s eminently rewarding to share the contributions of the fan community, particularly on those rare occasions when said art does not contain an illustrated Sidney Crosby getting disemboweled by Vancouver Island Marmot.  Happy we are that Rachel Cohen shared these gorgeous images of Nicklas Backstrom, Semyon Varlamov, and — the Russian Machine himself– Alexander Ovechkin.

Follow us past the jump, where we get to know Rachel and her lovely artwork.

Rachel Cohen poses with her Unleash The Fury sign. Too cool.

Rachel Cohen is a 19-year old student at the University of Hartford.  Lamenting that she is the seemingly only Caps fan on campus, Rachel has focused her efforts as an illustration major into beautifully stylized and somewhat demented graphics of the team’s young guns.  Emblazoned on posters and carried to her seat in section 104 (please voice your jealousy in the comments below), Rachel and her artwork have been shown on the Verizon Center jumbotron, Señor Steinberg’s Bog Del Deporte, and Comcast SportsNet.

Rachel’s battle standard is dear to our heart: a picture of Alex Ovechkin as the Russian Machine.  Everything quintessential to Alex is there: shaggy hair, missing tooth, hidden robotic skeleton; and Rachel’s  keen lines and composition communicate that classic Ovechkinian panache.  But we pity Rachel, as she must redraw this poster to update Ovie’s A to a C before September.

Bonus art!  Check out Rachel’s dynamic posters of Ovie and Nicklas Backstrom.  I love the flair in incorporating each player’s native flag into the design and the pastiche use of screentone patterns behind each figure.  The colors are vivid, and the image seems to move as quickly as the players do in real life.  Fantastic stuff, but now we have to convince Rachel to make us a Russian Machine desktop wallpaper for next year!

Here’s one of my favorites.  Youngling goalie Semyon Varlamov, shown in silhouette, looking debonair as hell in a tuxedo and hockey accoutrements.  If Varly can cut a figure this nice, he’s going to outshine even Brooks Laich at CapsCare Casino Night next year.

We leave you with some of Rachel’s doodlings, scrawled out in idle moments when she should probably be studying for a biology exam or somesuch.  You can expect Rachel’s 90-volume manga serial starring the Capitals to hit bookshelves sometime in 2015.  In the meantime, let’s do everything we can to help Ted Leonsis look this good.

Thank you, Rachel, for sharing your terrific art with us.  Contributions like this are what the fan community is all about, and we’re so grateful to be in a position to spread this kind of stuff.  Please, everyone, leave a comment for Rachel below and check out her other work on deviantART.   We hope you’re inspired to transmute your Caps fever into art just like she has.  When you finish your opus, hit us up and we’ll post it right here on RMNB.

We here at RMNB are creative. Peter Hassett is an incredibly gifted musician (here’s one of my favorite songs), Fedor stays up and watches Caps Games live in Moscow at 3am even when he has school a few hours later, Neil is a master of the English language, Stevie K. has a weird fascination with numbers and I’m marginally unterrible at what I do. The point being we love, love, love creativity.

So naturally, when Taylor P. sent us an email with all of her beautiful Capital Player artwork attached, we had to put it up. Check out the rest of her work below the jump and make sure to let her know what you think in the comments. Here, we’ll start you off: “Wow, Taylor you’re awesome.”

New Drawings as of 4/10:

We’ve already gotten a few outstanding entries for our Barack The Red call for Artwork. But the first entry I thought was worth sharing comes above from Nathan Burchfiel who has created The Barackstronaut. YES! LOOK AT HIM GROOVE!!

Anyways Caps Fans, from now until the end of the regular season, if you’ve got a clever and humorous way of artistically showing Barack Obama as a Capitals Fan, please shoot it our way. We’ll put it up on our Petition Page (please join if you haven’t yet) and you’ll be entered to to win our grand prize – a free t-shirt from our store. If you place in the top 5, your work goes on the Barack The Red website. Keep the artwork coming!