Yankee Greats

I indicated in a previous post that I grew up watching the Yankees play some other team on Saturday mornings. So a lot of my baseball art has been of  Yankees greats like Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig,  Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford, Bill Dickey, and more. The image here has a nice story attached to it as it gave me an opportunity to speak on the phone with the Yankee Clipper himself. A thrill to say the least. It came about during my time with Sports Collectors Warehouse and I had completed a painting that was not this one of Mr. Di Maggio. His agent indicated he wanted something different to be done of him so he set it up for me to call him over the weekend. I was to call at a specific time and to expect to talk no longer than ten minutes. Upon making connection my conversation started out with a fact that my wife was related to him. It seems her Mother's  Father and Joe's Dad were first cousins from the same town somewhere in Sicily. That set the tone for the conversation in which he paid me a compliment about my art he had seen. He indicated he had played with or against a lot of the players I had done for SCW up to that point and that I had nailed their likeness. That took us to the problem at hand and we discussed the changes he would like to see in the next attempt at the painting. The conversation ended after not ten minutes but thirty. I will always look fondly on that with pride. Long story short, I never did the painting for SCW as Mr. DiMaggio called me to tell me he did not trust the publisher and stopped the project. How did this painting end up getting done you ask? A collector contacted me to help him get some lithos he had paid for and I was able to take care of his request. After a couple of years he commissioned me to do a private painting for his collection of Mr. DiMaggio and gave me complete control of how it would look. We settled on the design that Mr. DiMaggio and I had discussed in our first conversation and that he wanted to be shown as the complete ballplayer. The rest of the story is that I complete the painting and a few years later get asked by the National Italian Sports Hall of Fame in Chicago to have them use it on the Official Publication for the museum. I did and six months before he passed away, Mr. DiMaggio gets to see the painting done the way we had discussed. Two years ago the owner of the original asked if it would be possible to produce a small number of prints of the painting that he could sell to some friends who admired the painting. We produced just 56 prints and to have a remarque drawn on each one. A true limited edition giclee. There are just a handful left and anyone interested in purchasing can contact me through this blog.