Art and Baseball

I have the good fortune to be able to coach my son’s and daughter’s baseball teams. Though the season spans the busiest time of year for galleries (May through July), the travel from town to town, region to region, does allow for the discovery of new subjects for paintings. This year, my son’s 12-year-old all-star travel team swept the Districts tournament (playing some tough New Hampshire teams) to make it to States. At the time of this writing, we’re preparing for the State Championship game tonight against the undefeated team. Having entered the losers bracket with a loss in our second game, the team has won every game since and has clawed it’s way back to the championship game. That’s the upside. The downside is that the tournament is way up in the White Mountains, in the small town of Lancaster, just an out-of-the-park-homerun from the Canadian border. We make the 5-hour round-trip drive daily But the upside to this downside is that the Whites are full of old barns, beautiful landscapes, Christmas tree farms, and old farmhouses.

The barn pictured is right behind the parking lot of the fields where we play. I’ve seen this barn (and envisioned it as a painting) daily for the past 8 days. Yesterday afternoon I shot this picture of it. Once the tournament is over, win or lose, this will become a series of sketches, then a painting or two. I spotted another beautiful barn last night on our drive South just before entering Franconia Notch. On our way up (again!) this afternoon, I’ll shoot that. It’s a huge, simple barn, sitting on a hillside with Indian Head mountain in the background. No shortage of inspiration…even during Baseball season.