Card Paintings Gallery

Welcome to my gallery of card paintings. I started making them in the fall of 2020, while the coronavirus pandemic was raging along with the presidential election, and the sixty-game major league baseball season was winding down. The idea of taking old cards from my collection and making something new out of them was very appealing.

So that's what I've done here. Most of the examples in these galleries come from my own collection, but others are from eBay and my favorite local card shop. Older cards from before 1990 tend to be easier to paint because their card stock isn't coated as glossily or heavily. My process is fairly simple. I coat the areas that I want to paint in gesso, and on top of that I add a painted background or foreground. I'm experimenting with painting all areas of the card, not limited to the masked areas. (If you like what you see here, also check out my presentation to the SABR Babe Ruth Chapter earlier this year. It was a great discussion, and I'm grateful to SABR-Baltimore for their great welcome.)

The cards are organized into nine rooms, which are ever growing, changing, and evolving:

• Data Visualization Paintings (NEW): a more recent direction using principles of data visualization to illustrate the careers of notable baseball players, as well as poets and performers.
• The Black Aces: a gallery of the Black Aces, twelve Black pitchers who won twenty games or more in a major league season, as profiled by the late pitcher Jim "Mudcat" Grant.
• Color fields: inspired by 1960s pop artists like Mark Rothko, these paintings experiment with color that compliments the players' uniforms and visual elements on the card.
• Icons: drawing on my love for Russian icons, these card paintings focus on especially great or notable players, including Hall of Famers, in a way that emphasizes their immortal achievements on the field.
• Landscapes: these paintings place players outside of traditional ballparks and in a figurative natural environment.
• Other directions: paintings that explore and experiment with design and forms.
• Washington : paintings that portray Washington, DC's major league baseball history, including the Senators, Nationals, and Montreal Expos.
• Minyan: for Passover 2021, paintings that explore Jewish identity by portraying ten Jewish baseball players, from the 1940s to the present.
• Silver Bullets : paintings of notable women in baseball, including players from the All-American Girls' Professional Baseball League, the Colorado Silver Bullets, and the first woman to coach in Major League Baseball.
• Generations: a gallery of fathers and sons (and one mother and son) who are connected by their participation in professional baseball.