I think that I know a lot of things about photography and art and have met a lot of very talented people who can do both. I do know that I can do neither.
There are artists that can take a photograph and reproduce it perfectly on canvas and it is an incredible skill, but I’ve never seen the point, because you can just look at the picture.
Graig Kreindler takes old baseball photographs and reproduces them on canvas, but with his own point of view and always adds something artistically in a way only he can do because all of us, artists or not, are unique.
The above painting comes from this photo by Charles Conlon, who was an incredible artist, whose story no one knew for a long time.
At that time pretty much no one, but Conlon was taking baseball photographs at all. Baseball players were thought in large part to be lowlifes. That is what the father of the guy sliding in that photo thought about his son Ty Cobb.
Conlon thought he had missed that picture and then realized that he took it accidentally by instinct, and a lot of people think that it is the best, most famous baseball photograph of all time.
If others were taking baseball photographs at the time, no one had the access that Conlon did. A lot of his work and his story sat around in vaults lost like Charles Foster Kane’s possessions until the mid-90s.
Here is Graig Kreindler’s Twitter pinned tweet. I’d rather use his profile, but I’m not proficient enough to have succeeded.
Honored to be on @UniWatch chatting with @PhilHecken about the upcoming show at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum!! https://t.co/eMVVTwrPcC
— Graig Kreindler (@GraigKreindler) August 14, 2018
Here is his website:
This is the “children’s” book that got me to love baseball.
That’s Casey Stengel on the cover after he got traded from Brooklyn to Pittsburgh welcoming the Brooklyn fans who use to love him on his first return to Ebbets Field. They loved him for a lot of reasons, but most of all because he had a lot of fun. There he was having fun tipping his hat to the boos and having a hidden bird fly out. I believe that everyone then had fun and cheered.
That book by Howard Liss tells a lot of fun stories about guys who were mostly great players, but some who were merely fun. The book is great fun, and it made me love baseball especially baseball from that era.
Here is Graig Kreindler’s painting of Casey Stengel.
Casey is sort of smiling, but you can see from how Kriendler painted that photograph that there is fun in that half smile and a lot of mischiouvous fun in those eyes.
I don’t really follow baseball that much anymore. Money has kind of killed it for me.
I mostly dwell on the past where those players were not really in control of their occupations and didn’t make much money. That has always made me a little sad, but I do know that most of them had a lot of fun.
I know all the history of who made money how and who had fun. I know who should have made more and who should have been allowed to have more fun.
I have fun reminiscing on the past and thinking about it all and the images that I have romanticized.
Graig Kreindler doesn’t only paint, but he makes videos showing you his process and how he makes his art. They are on his website.
No one really argues on Graig’s Twitter feed. If they do, it may be something like whether Babe Ruth was better than Josh Gibson, but everyone there loves both Babe Ruth and Josh Gibson.
My guess is that Graig does this out of nearly pure artistic ambitions.
I’ve gotten a lot of joy from seeing his work for free.
I don’t care if he wants to make any money, but I hope he makes enough to at least be happy, have fun, and keep making his art for us all to share together.
Bonus Material: Here is my favorite photograph in baseball history.
That’s Jackie Robinson caught in a rundown after doing something “zany.” The entire oppposing team is trying to get him out. I’ve seen other versions of this picture and the rest of that team is behind third base also trying to get him out.
Jackie Robinson scored!
