Happy New Year!

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope you had a wonderful holiday, however you celebrate (and if you celebrate). Putting 2020 to bed was a pleasant turning of the page. I hope 2021 holds better things for us, but despite the difficulties we experienced in the past year, I hope that we can also point to ways that we've grown in understanding ourselves and the people around us.

I spent a fair bit of time over the last few weeks (and since my last post) making new card paintings and getting ready for my talk on January 20th with the Babe Ruth (Baltimore) chapter of SABR. (You need to be a SABR member to view the meeting live. If you would like to join, you can check it out here. My talk will also be posted to SABR's YouTube channel afterwards.)

I've been thinking a lot about what motivates my paintings. I've painted watercolors and acrylics since I was in high school, but this year something struck me about the resurgence of the card hobby during the pandemic, and the simple idea of taking cards that are lying in shoeboxes and making something new from them, that still says something about me. So here are a few of the inspirations:

• 
  Russian iconography: I've loved Russian icons for many years, particularly the bright colors and the golden backgrounds. Especially for sports heroes, I wanted to treat some of them literally like icons. I especially like this image of Randy Johnson; the beatific expression on his face seems to lend itself to being robed in gold.
  

• Color field painting: this was popular in the 1950s and 1960s, when artists began to explore color theory outside of actually painting pictures of objects, and the idea of seeing how blocks of color worked against brightly colored uniforms and
  
  designs was interesting.

• Pop art: another theme that works very well for some cards, especially this version of a Julio Franco card from the 1989 Topps set, after the Cleveland MLB team announced that it was going to change its name.
  
  
  

I'm really interested in knowing what you think about these cards, both the ones I've linked here and on the main gallery page (which is a work in progress). Please share these page as widely as you like. I would love to learn more about what you think is interesting in card designs, and what you think of these paintings.

I've also been sharing my cards with the growing number of people whom I know in the hobby (thanks, Steve and Aaron at Collectors World in Annandale, VA). This year offers promise, as we look to come out of our isolation, hopefully fairly soon. But in the meantime, I hope to share more of these paintings and thoughts with you.