Dick Perez salutes great Philly players in “Art at Home Plate’ (original) (raw)
Growing up in Harlem in the 1950s, Dick Perez played a brilliantly simple game. All he needed was a second player, a stick, a rubber ball called a Spaldeen, a wall painted with a strike zone and a fenced playground. Hits were determined by height; when he hit the top of the fence, Perez imagined he was his hero, Mickey Mantle, watching a tape-measure home run smack the upper deck of Yankee Stadium.
For four decades Perez has filtered the purity of stickball and childhood worship into his baseball paintings. As the official artist of the Philadelphia Phillies and the National Baseball Hall of Fame, the 63-year-old resident of Wayne, Delaware County, specializes in zesty, invitingly antique portraits of players at their peak. They pose, pitch, catch, slide and sign autographs in the great outdoors, which Perez heightens with a sneaky brand of American impressionism. Turns out he admires a Hall of Fame painter named John Singer Sargent.
Perez’s latest series is a symbolic grand slam. Starting today, his oils of 32 Philadelphians in the National Baseball Hall of Fame will be exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, a shrine to Thomas Eakins, an occasional baseball artist. Perez’s portraits of Phillies (Mike Schmidt, who hit 548 home runs), Philadelphia A’s (Charles Albert “Chief” Bender, a Chippewa credited with mastering the nickel curve, or slider) and greater Philadelphia natives (Reggie Jackson, a graduate of Cheltenham High School) were commissioned by the Phillies, Perez’s employer since 1972, for the Cooperstown Gallery of Citizens Bank Park, the team’s new, old-fashioned home opening in April.
“Art at Home Plate” is conversation kindling, made for the fan warming up for spring training. The Hot Stove League will be stoked by talk of Negro League third baseman Judy Johnson, a clutch hitter and clutch fielder who scouted for the Phillies and A’s; umpire Bill McGowan, a pioneer actor who called 2,541 consecutive games, 91 fewer than Cal Ripken Jr. played in a row, and Rube Waddell, the talented, bizarre pitcher who allegedly refused to sign a contract until his roommate stopped eating animal crackers in bed.
Perez likes resurrecting forgotten players like Eppa Rixey, a slender left-hander who won 266 games for the Phillies and Reds and once allowed a remarkable one homer in a 301-inning season. “They’re all people who excelled at some time,” notes Perez, who in 1958 moved with his family from Harlem to North Philadelphia, following his stepfather’s conversion from merchant marine to bus porter. “They all have some claim to something.”
Another attraction is playing social historian. In the pictures at the Pennsylvania Academy, Perez chronicles a century of changing fashions. There are uniforms with collars and suspenders, women with bird’s-nest hats, scoreboards with hand-cranked numbers. Ads for hard liquor contain the only whiff of scandal in these fleecy, healthy scenes. As Perez points out, the likes of Grover Cleveland Alexander (373 victories) and Jimmie Fox (534 homers) were doomed by the likes of “Green River — The Whiskey with a Kick.”
Baseball allows Perez to honor his painting saints. Singer Sargent’s spirit appears in his chesty treatment of light, while Diego Velasquez haunts his churning treatment of fabric. A picture of Chief Bender warming up is notable not only for a cop sitting on a root-beer case, but for grass that resembles a field of impressionist wildflowers.
Perez’s paintings are as tricky as a Pedro Martinez changeup. He estimates he re-created 75 percent of the scenes, adapting 750 photographs from Phillies files and his own vast repository of vintage images. He borrowed the body language of another player for a picture starring Richie Ashburn, the beloved Phillies outfielder and broadcaster. Perez’s son, Dan, took one look at the casual ballet of a sliding Ashburn, a lunging catcher and a hovering umpire and compared it to one of Matisse’s dance paintings. Perez agreed; that’s why the painting is called “La Danse.”
To give his pictures more action, Perez offers a gallery of angles and gestures. Jim Bunning, a star Phillies pitcher and now a Kentucky senator, uses his glove to keep himself from falling down during his follow-through. A dapper Connie Mack, who managed the Philadelphia A’s for 50 years, exchanges an autographed ball for a flower from a well-dressed female fan. Statue-like faces, borrowed from 19th-century cards intended for home cabinets, share the wall with rough, realistic mugs, borrowed from Charles M. Conlon’s magnetically human photographs, circa 1904 to 1942.
Not good enough to play pro baseball, Perez is good enough for some major league collections. Ronald Reagan owns his portrait of Grover Cleveland Alexander, played by the future president in the 1952 film “The Winning Team.” Ichiro Suzuki, the fleet, cunning right fielder for the Seattle Mariners, commissioned a painting of a Japanese stickball scene. It’s based on a Harlem stickball scene that Suzuki saw at the Baseball Hall of Fame, which has a gallery of Perez portraits of Hall of Famers.
“I thought Ichiro would ask me to paint a favorite player when he was a kid, like Babe Ruth or Sadaharu Oh [who holds the all-time pro baseball record of 868 homers],” says Perez. “Instead, he wanted something representative of the game. He’s an aficionado, a romantic.”
Perez recalls that only one player complained about being Perezed. Evidently, Johnny Mize, a career .312 hitter who helped the Yankees win five straight World Series championships, thought he was painted too young. He backed off when his wife insisted: “You never looked so good.”
One of Perez’s favorite perks is meeting favorite players he’s painted. He fondly remembers playing tennis with Ted Williams, the fabled hitter, batting theorist and mythic character. “Ted was truly everything I thought he would be,” says Perez of the famously cantankerous, friendly “Splendid Splinter.” “He definitely had an aura about him.”
Perez refused to introduce himself to his childhood hero. He didn’t want to taint his hallowed image of Mantle, whose career as a powerful, speedy switch hitter was tarnished by injuries, alcoholism and genetic disease.
“I never wanted to meet him after meeting many players and finding them to be regular human beings,” explains Perez. “In my mind Mickey Mantle never struck out, he always hit in the clutch. I wanted to keep Mickey in that sphere of nostalgia, aloft in my memory.”
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THE DETAILS
“ART AT HOME PLATE’
What: Exhibition of Dick Perez’s oil paintings of 32 Philadelphians in the National Baseball Hall of Fame
When: Today through Feb. 29
Where: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 118 N. Broad St., Philadelphia
Special events: Hands-on art activities with baseball artists, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Jan. 31; signing by Perez and appearance by the Phillie Phanatic, 12:30-3 p.m. Feb. 14
Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday; 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday
Admission: Free; admission to other galleries is 5;5; 5;4, seniors and students; $3, ages 5-18
Info: 215-972-7600, www.pfa.org
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Originally Published: January 8, 2004 at 5:00 AM EST