Growing up in New York City’s Harlem in the 1950s I was absorbed and obsessed by the game of baseball and enraptured by the baseball cards produced by Topps.  The early spring ritual of stopping in the candy store on the way home from school and buying those gum-scented first-of the-season packs of cards was enchanting.  To me, the most memorable is the 1953 issue of cards by Topps.  I didn’t know why at the time, but these cards looked exceptionally unique.  As I later discovered, they were all hand-painted cards. Somehow the images appeared more enhanced than the photographic ones and I was attracted to them.  Of course, I did not know art, and specifically baseball illustration, was in my future.  While the margins of my school notebooks were filled with little drawings of airplanes, cowboys, cartoons of classmates, and yes, baseball players, I was too busy preparing myself to take over centerfield for Mickey Mantle when he retired.  I played baseball every day in that quest and drew less and less.  As it became clear that Mickey wasn’t going to retire soon, and if he did I was not good enough to take his place, I began to play less and draw more.  

Early in my career I was still passionate about the game and equally passionate about painting and illustration.  It was then that I became fascinated by art in baseball and baseball card art.  As the number of cards in sets grew it became prohibitive to produce whole sets of art cards.  In fact, I believe that ’53 set was the last set to use art as a means of illustrating baseball players.  I was not a card collector per se when I met Frank Steele in 1976.  Frank was a collector and he introduced me to world of vintage baseball cards and the beautiful art that was used to illustrate them before color photography.  I lamented the disappearance of art from baseball cards, and thus began our endeavor, in some measure, to bring the use of art back to baseball cards.  We accomplished this with the Baseball Hall of Fame Art Post Cards, Diamond Kings and many other productions.

I now find myself creating paintings for Topps, the company that introduced me to art cards.  My first project was providing art for their Allen & Ginter set of cards and now, the most challenging opus, the 51 paintings for their 2007 edition of Turkey Reds.  Paying homage to these cards published in 1911 has been an exciting project requiring research and focus.  They were produced in an era that was a golden age for baseball and baseball cards.  The marketing of baseball cards became big business during that period.  Cigarette companies such as Piedmont, Ramly, Hassan and Turkey Red were producing gorgeous full color art images, brilliantly hand-painted by artists using old world lithography.

The most stunning of all of these was the 1911 T-3 Cabinet Cards known as the Turkey Reds.  Many hobbyists consider the illustrations on the T-3s the best artwork ever captured on a baseball card and the best card set ever produced.  I agree.  The simplicity of the card design combines with the intricacy of the artwork to create true works of art.  The light filled scenes with inventive skies and suggestive backgrounds seem to have been inspired by the age of Romanticism and one of the movement’s leading artists, 18th century British landscapist, Joseph Mallord William Turner, especially the skies.  It is the “Turneresque” skies that I find most compelling and sought to capture in the paintings. 

As usual I seek to bring something new and of myself to the project.  I have provided a little more intricacy.  The concept of marrying current ballplayers with 1910 and 1911 scenery symbolizes the continuum of baseball.  Though the game has gone through some changes it is still very much connected to its past, evidenced by the many retro parks that have been built.  Fan passion and hero worship are still very much with us.  Three outs, three strikes, four balls, 90 feet between bases and many other features have been with us since the beginning of the twentieth century.   One aspect to my renditions is that I made sure that the team ballparks of the players portrayed are those that existed in the year that the Turkey Reds were produced.   For the Phillies there is Baker Bowl, for the Yankees there is Hilltop Park, for the Red Sox there is Huntingdon Avenue Grounds, and so on.  Of course, the modern teams from Tampa Bay, Houston, Minnesota, etc, required only backgrounds reminiscent of the period.

I believe that my contribution to the 2007 Topps Turkey Red cards is the best work that I have done for the baseball card industry.  I hope it lives up to the esteem of the 1911 T-3s and that I have captured the spirit of what those wonderful lithographic artists created almost a hundred years ago.


Turkey Reds
Allen & Ginter One on One Cards
Special Cards