Diamond in the Moonlight– Coming to Principle Gallery, June 14
Baseball is the most perfect of games, solid, true, pure and precious as diamonds. If only life were so simple. Within the baselines anything can happen. Tides can reverse; oceans can open. That’s why they say, “the game is never over until the last man is out.” Colors can change, lives can alter, anything is possible in this gentle, flawless, loving game.
–W. P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe (1982)
While the Red Tree is the focus of my upcoming June exhibit at the Principle Gallery, I couldn’t resist including a pair of new paintings in the show that feature the baseball diamond.
Deep Right Field- Coming to Principle Gallery, June14
I produce a handful of these pieces every year and they are always among my favorites to paint. I think it might be from the associations formed in my mind from a lifetime of following the game, of rooting for teams and players, of reading about the history of the game, of memorizing stats, and just being captivated by the game.
Even now, while I sometimes struggle to remember details from a week ago (or yesterday!), I still easily remember that Ty Cobb ended his career with a .366 batting average, that the 1941 season featured both Ted Williams achieving the last .400 batting average for a season and Joe Dimaggio having an incredible 56 game hitting streak. 83 years later and both still stand.
Or maybe it’s that Walt Whitman put it in an interview near the end of his life: Baseball is the hurrah game of the republic!
Or maybe it’s the timelessness of the game. While there is now a pitch clock for individual pitches, it is still an untimed game. You go until the last out is called. As the late great baseball writer Roger Angell wrote:
Since baseball time is measured only in outs, all you have to do is succeed utterly; keep hitting, keep the rally alive, and you have defeated time. You remain forever young.
There might something to that. Angell lived until the age of 101, recording his last out in 2022.
That timeless quality also connects us to tradition and history in a very tangible way. While the game has changed in some ways, it remains the same game played by generations of our ancestors. I found a box score in an old newspaper from a game played in a local industrial league in 1905 where my grandfather was listed as playing outfield. The idea of the guy I knew only as old man roaming the outfield on some diamond as a youth sparked my imagination and made me see him in other ways. Made me wonder what he was thinking in that time and place. It was a connection that I might not make without baseball.
Again, more eloquently put from Roger Angell:
Baseball’s time is seamless and invisible, a bubble within which players move at exactly the same pace and rhythms as all their predecessors. This is the way the game was played in our youth and in our fathers’ youth, and even back then… there must have been the same feeling that time could be stopped.
These pieces capture that feeling of timelessness for me.
And that’s good enough for me. More than I could ask.
These are from Continuum: The Red Tree at 25, my 25th annual solo exhibit at the Principle Gallery in Alexandria, VA. The show opens with a reception on the evening of June 14, 2024 that I will be attending.
The painting at the top of the page is Diamond in the Moonlight and is 16″ high by 8″ wide on canvas. The one below is Deep Right Field which is 20″ high by 10″ wide.
Redtree Times 