Batter up! It’s baseball season again, and sometimes I wonder how it came from being just a backyard game to such a big world forum.
My mother remembers kicking and hitting cans around in her youth.
With the large family that I grew up in we had enough for our own baseball team. We just needed another big family to play with. Fortunately there were a couple other large familys who farmed near us.
Even though our yard was relatively big, it was still more adventageous to make use of the expanse of the nearest field. We also were not allowed to hit balls so close to the house windows. Different crops that were growing in the fields presented different disadvantages. Of course there were times when the crop was just too big to be able to take advantage of the area. Hay could wrap itself around your ankles making that speedy steal to second a real challenge. A corn field was only accessible after the crop was harvested. Even at that time the stubble of the crop remainds could cause a relative hazard. If you caught your toe on the gnarly corn roots you could end up taking a dive and ending up with a corn stalk up your nose.
In any case playing sports out in the fields offered another opportunity to be creative. While waiting for the ball to come to me out in left field I could braid strands of hay stems or model clumps of mud from the barren corn field. It seems like everything presents an art opportunity.
And artists throughout the ages have sought any opportunity to create art that would say something about the times in which the artist lived. Part of these times have almost always included sport. And so there are many varieties works that show sports in art
. This article mentions only a few of them like George Bellows and Leroy Nieman. The sketch I’ve displayed here, done with conte pencils, harks back to a time when a family of girls heads to the park for just a little baseball fun. Make sure you catch the spirit this summer. It’s time to take to the fields.