The late A. Bartlett Giamatti, who became Commissioner of Major League Baseball after a distinguished career as a Renaissance scholar, wrote, "Baseball is one of the few enduring institutions in America that has been continuous and adaptable and in touch with its origins. As a result, baseball is not simply an essential part of this country, it is a living memory of what American culture, at its best, wishes to be." I think that’s right.

As a boy I remember watching my Dad play centerfield for the Physics Department at Yale University. A little later, when I was about seven or eight, he took me to Forbes Field in Pittsburgh to watch the Pirates. All in all, I’ve watched baseball and played baseball and thought about baseball most of my life.

Baseball possesses all the elements of good drama from the days of the Greeks to our own - two individuals pitted against each other in a conflict that is both personal and representative of the larger groups to which the individuals belong. The players are always the players, trafficking in elemental human activities and emotions - attack, defense, courage, gallantry, steadfastness, grandeur, ruse. Any art or sport that by accident or design gets too far away from such elemental emotions finds that it has to return or wither. They are the very stuff of human life. It is of this stuff that the drama of baseball is composed.

The paintings in this exhibition are not ‘sports paintings’ per se. Of the twenty paintings I’ve completed to date only six show games being played and two of those paintings are about the fans - the ballgame itself is seen at a distance an afterthought compared to the relationships among the people in the stands. That said, the opportunity to spend time watching these ballplayers play the game as well as it can be played and, in particular, to sit and watch and draw and reflect on this aspect of the human experience is a grand privilege.

The paintings come from several sources - direct observation as reflected in the small drawing and painting sketches as well as photographs of the field and stadium. They are also works of a projected imagination. I tried to represent as accurately as I could players and fans at the ballpark but none of the scenes I depicted actually happened exactly as I painted them - they could have, however, and that’s what counts.

Many of the paintings in this series are based on the panoramic format. It is a compositional strategy used by a number of landscape artists including the American nineteenth century painters Martin Johnson Heade, Sanford Gifford, Worthington Whittredge, John Kensett, and Eastman Johnson as well as the contemporary painter Rackstraw Downes. I have only occasionally worked with panoramas prior to this. I remember though, that after my first week in Wichita most of the drawings I’d done were long, thin compositions. As I began making paintings in my studio last fall it became clear to me that most of my ideas took place in this extended format. A friend of mine, Joan Troccoli, said she liked the new baseball pictures because "in baseball so much is going on all over the place and only occasionally does everyone focus on just one thing, kind of like life itself."

The American painter George Bellows was supposed to be a pretty good baseball player - actually a good all-round athlete - and while he wasn’t a ballplayer of note, Thomas Eakins made a number of first rate watercolors about baseball. I can’t recall many professional baseball players who have gone onto making art. In A Pair of Blue Eyes, Thomas Hardy wrote, "It is only those who half know a thing that write about it; those who know it thoroughly don’t take the trouble." I reckon that’s my excuse.