The Fenway Paintings started in the summer of 2004 after I went to a Red Sox game. I got to the ballpark early and made my way around the park as the afternoon was wearing on. The light became wonderful and I started to shoot photographs. It was a golden light coming over the "Green Monster" at a sharp angle which lit up the bullpen and the bleachers. The blaze of red seats in the lower grandstands in right field was scintillating and the Pesky pole was a sharp spear of yellow carving through all that red. Anyone who has been to the park at this time of day will know what I mean.
Fenway has always been a shrine of sorts or even a type of cathedral to me. It is a family affair going back to my grandfathers who both blessed and cursed the "lovable bums" as they used to think of them. Ken Burns film on baseball gets to the heart of the matter. I am trying to find the visual heart of Fenway and what the ballpark feels like. I have taken tours of it and gone up in the Prudential building and the Hancock Tower to get shots of the field from different perspectives. I continue to walk around the Park at different times of the day and even different seasons to generate more ideas about how I can bring something of the Park to the canvas.
It is simply my hope that the images provoke those who see them to reminisce and be a little sentimental, though I hope not to paint sentimental images. That is a psychological challenge for me as an artist: to create an image that can deal with a sentimental subject and not imbue the image with sentiment.
