The May Illustration and Baseball

The May Illustration for the Philadelphia Sketch Club

  May is always a busy month for me- our Senior Show at Moore is at the end of April, and I usually spend the first part of May trying to catch up with all the things I put off while getting that show up and running. I started this piece for the Philadelphia Sketch Club May edition of The Portfolio in early April as the major league baseball regular season was just getting  going. Along with it, the baseball season for Newtown, Pennsylvania, was just getting started as well. One of the town baseball fields is directly across the street from me, and I enjoy watching the game and hearing the sounds of kids playing baseball. I just have to be careful where I park my truck, as our yard and the street can be the landing zone for more than a few foul balls.  Baseball is my favorite sport to watch, because it means it is summer. 

   Some of my fondest memories from growing up in Utica include washing the cars with my Dad on a sunny summer afternoon and listening to a ball game on the radio. I rarely ever watch baseball on television, I almost always listen to it on the radio while I work in my studio or around the house, or while I am driving. Subsequently, I am often surprised when I see a photograph of a ball player I have only heard  described on the radio by  the play by play announcers. For instance,  unless a player has a last name that identifies them as being of Latino descent, I picture them in my head as just “a baseball player”; you never hear the announcer say "And here is  Daniel Murphy coming to bat; He is hitting .267 with three home runs, and he is a tall white man with facial hair”...

Mr. Ball Player, prior to his days playing for the NY Mets

  In my head, almost all professional  baseball players  I have not seen look like Art Shamsky from the 1960’s Cincinatti Reds, and are older than me. I guess that is one of the reasons I prefer listening to baseball on the radio; When I do, I always feel like a young guy helping his dad wash the station wagon on a sunny summer afternoon.

-Rich

Philadelphia Sports Weekly Cartoon

On May 6th, the first cartoon I have done for the Philadelphia Daily News weekend paper Philadelphia Sports Week will appear. It's not available on line, so I will post a copy of the weekly cartoon on this blog when it appears each Sunday. The editors help come up with the concept, and then I  (ahem..) take the ball and run with it.

I received a few ideas from the editors, and once the Editor In Chief, Becky Batcha, gave the green light to go with this sketch, I had a lot of fun drawing it. Becky and I go back all the way to our college days at the Daily Orange at Syracuse University, and I wanted to make as good an impression with this first cartoon for PSW as I did with the first cartoon I drew back in 1981 for her DO editorial about martial law in Poland. I hope that I (ahem..) hit a home run with this one, too...

I was worried that after I submitted the final illustration on Thursday at noon that the Phillies would go on an offensive tear for the next 3 games and cause the cartoon to look pretty lame; however, they  managed to hand the Washington Nationals the Friday night game and today rolled over in a 7-1 loss. I can only hope the Nationals get a three-game sweep of the Phils with a shutout on Sunday to keep this cartoon relevant. After that, Philadelphia can go back to being a powerhouse NL East contender again. It might make for good cartoon material this summer.

-Rich

Some More New Work

In the previous post, I spoke of the Philadelphia Sketch Club, the old time arts organization that I am the Vice President of. One of the nice things about being in the club is being able to take part in exhibitions. I say this because as a member you usually are alerted to and reminded of upcoming exhibitions months in advance by the members who are organizing them. Other exhibitions I usually find out about too late or miss the deadline for entry all together . Thank goodness for on-line entries that allow you to submit work up until midnight…

1957 Chevrolet 210 gouache on paper 8"x6" 

One of the shows at the Sketch Club I always try to enter is the Small Oils Exhibition. This year’s edition is the 149^th Annual Small Oils Exhibition, but I’m not certain those 149 years happened consecutively, since the club is entering it’s 153^rd year. I think they may have had a break in there for Sketch Club members to fight in the American Civil War.  In any regard, it’s a great show to be juried into it, and there have been years when I did not get in. One of the reasons for rejection probably is that I do not work in oils, and I always find myself entering work painted with something that approximates oil paint, like acrylics. 

1949 Buick gouache on paper 7" x 6"

Lately I have been finishing some work—all automotive subjects- in gouache. I always hesitated in working with it, because #1, it is expensive to buy gouache, and I knew the first few things I tried in it would be lousy; and #2, I can never really remember how to spell the word “gouache”. If it wasn’t for spell check on this computer, I doubt I would ever get it right.

1956 T Bird gouache on paper 7"x 6"

Gouache is similar to a thick watercolor, or like the tempera paint we used in grade school that came in glass jars with metal lids we hard time unscrewing when the paint dried around the top.  The gouache I use is a much higher quality than that paint, and also comes in tubes so the tops are easier to open. Expensive, yes; but it cleans up with water, dries quickly, and doesn’t smell, so it’s great for me to work with.

1959 Ford rear gouache on paper 7" x 6"

It is a fun medium to use, and one of the things I really like about it is the fast drying time and the finished look it has. I had used it sparingly on my water colors after seeing some of James Toogood’s (http://www.jamestoogood.com) work in person- I was impressed with how he combines the transparent and opaque effects watercolor provides. I also noticed that a lot of the automotive paintings I really admired from the 1950’s and 60’s were executed using gouache. Slowly, I got to the point where I was using the gouache exclusively to complete a painting more opaquely, and this year I was able to sneak two of them past three jurors into this year’s  149^th Exhibition of Small Oils.   -Rich

1940 Ford Sedan gouache on paper 7" x 6"

 

Some New Work, After A Long While…

Illustration for April.. a caricature of illustrator Mike Manley

It has been a while since I was able to last post; a very busy year with a lot of free lance illustration and gallery work combined with teaching at Moore leaves little time to post on a blog. I have written many blog posts in my head, but the act of typing them out and checking for grammatical and spelling errors was something I simply did not have the time for…I usually have time to write on the train ride back and forth between Newtown and Philadelphia, but I found myself using that time trying to keep up with emails…the iPhone and iPad  I bought to help stream line things have just helped me to be too busy to work on my iBook…

Illustration for January 2012 Portfoilio

Each month I have an opportunity to create an illustration for the Philadelphia Sketch Club’s newsletter, The Portfolio. With a name like that for a monthly publication, you know it has been around for a long time. Indeed, the club itself has been around for quite a while, having been founded in 1860 by  six illustrators looking for opportunities not available at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. The American Civil War put a damper on club activities until the surviving members returned home, but the club really took off after that, with Thomas Eakins eventually becoming the president of the place. The Philadelphia Sketch Club occupies an historic clubhouse on narrow little Camac Street  (“Camac- The Name is the Same, Forward and Back” an elderly gentleman who grew up on the street a few blocks  down from the Sketch Club related to me how he had memorized that when he was younger to remember his address) and the interior includes portraits of club members painted by Thomas Anschutz. They are umber and sienna hued works painted with brushy strokes of serious looking gentleman, nearly every one with a full beard and mustache. The Club was a men-only institution until the early 1990s. You can visit the Sketch Club web site at www.sketchclub.org

February illustration is rather Philadelphia-centric...

Times change, and The Philadelphia Sketch Club has subsequently gone co-ed; this year, The Portfolio has gone on-line. Prior to this, we used the high speed copier and black ink and folded and mailed the issues by hand, restricting the illustration to gray scale and 65 dpi. Now, I can use glorious RGB color at 72 dpi! Given this new freedom, and the change from a short horizontal rectangle to a slightly square one,  I am working to create images that I hope the members will look forward to seeing each month. The theme always needs to have something to do with creating art work and the calendar month or an event taking place at the Sketch Club.  I am posting the illustrations from January through April; still working on May!

-Rich

The illustration for March reflected our record setting warm weather...