Immortalizing legends Photos of long-ago athletes touch painter’s heart

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One painting shows Red Sox legend Ted Williams and Yankee Clipper Joe DiMaggio side by side, each with one foot propped on the dugout steps, each holding a bat.

Gee, that looks familiar. Wasn’t there a photograph that looked something like that?

There sure was. There always is, when the painter is Jessica Gandolf, a Portland artist who has lived in Maine for the past decade.

Gandolf specializes in sports paintings, and always works from old photographs. The original pictures likely were in black and white, and many of them show athletes that, at 42, she never saw play. Some of the photos date to the early 1900s.

In the upstairs studio in the rambling home she shares with husband Lincoln Peirce and their two children, Gandolf holds up a small painting depicting one such athlete.

“Joe Tinker,” she says, referring to the shortstop who was one-third of the Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance double-play combination for the Chicago Cubs in the early 1900s.

Though the trio became the subject of a poem, “nobody knows his first name,” she says with a hint of exasperation in her voice.

It’s been many decades since Joe Tinker made his lightning throws, but he’s the kind of sports figure Gandolf loves to paint.

Another portrait shows Walter “Big Train” Johnson, famed pitcher for the Washington Senators, and yet another is boxing champion Jack Dempsey, with that full head of wavy hair.

OK, so there’s a sports background in Jessica Gandolf’s life, right? Sure. While her mom was an actress, her dad was Ray Gandolf, familiar to sports fans from his writing and interviewing for television.

Growing up in Manhattan, Jessica Gandolf watched Yankees baseball and Knicks basketball, “and a few Mets games,” she said.

But really, she’s in no sense a real fan, “not rabid the way my husband is,” she said.

Gandolf was always drawing as a child, and she has the training of a contemporary artist – a bachelor’s degree from Oberlin College, with her junior year at the Sorbonne in Paris; a master’s in fine art from Brooklyn College.

In Paris, she had worked with live models, an experience that reinforced the idea “that I wanted to paint figures. I like painting bodies, I always have.”

She did a lot of experimenting with her art in grad school, a time she described as “this sort of hothouse. Everybody’s working, and it seems so important. But in my heart, I’m not an abstract painter.”

As a city girl, Gandolf was fascinated “with the whole Americana thing – boys holding pigs on farms. It was nothing that was a part of my experience, but it intrigued me.

“And I was really into old Life magazines,” she said, referring to the publication that specialized in photographs. “It was somewhat taboo at the time, but I started working from photographs, and all the work I had done from three dimensions really informed the painting.”

Gandolf began by painting from pictures of “baseball players no one had ever heard of. That might have had something to do with the fact I was having a very unrecognized career myself,” she said with a grin.

Her subjects now include some of the most well-known athletes ever – home run sluggers Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron, heavyweight boxing champs Joe Louis and Muhammed Ali.

The athletes come from baseball, boxing, basketball, swimming and a few other sports.

“My husband is a hockey player, but I’m not going there. The less gear, the better. I’m really interested in the faces and the gestures. The personalities in boxing and baseball are particularly interesting, and they’re something a lot of people have their own reference to,” she said.

“A lot of art is creating your own world, but I’m interested in bouncing off something that is,” she said. “I want to get in there with that old face. I enjoy looking at faces across time.”

Gandolf uses “old” in the sense of long ago, because the athletes in her paintings may well be in their younger years.

“Those guys were beautiful,” she said, looking at a portrait of Pepper Martin, third baseman for the Cardinals’ “Gashouse Gang” of the ’30s. Some of the works – and the original photos – have specific connotations for Gandolf.

A painting of Muhammed Ali, Sugar Ray Robinson and Joe Louis was based on what Ali once said was his favorite photograph, she explained. “It kind of reminded me of Picasso’s ‘Three Musicians.'”

Another work shows Yogi Berra, no doubt having just scored a run, descending into the Yankee dugout as fellow players come forward to congratulate him.

“One thing I love about Renaissance painting is tableaux,” Gandolf said, and this baseball picture shows such a scene, not unlike paintings of Jesus and his followers. “See the way the hands are reaching up.”

Gandolf calls her oil paintings “realistic, but not naturalistic,” and there are definite differences between them and the original photographs. She adds color, not to mention a background that is often different from that in the photo – a sky, or wallpaper, for example.

“There’s a surreal element,” she acknowledged, adding that in some cases, it looks as though there were “a super-duper flashlight shining on one part of a painting, almost a dissonance.”

Many of the paintings also demonstrate a definite sense of touch – brothers Paul and Dizzy Dean with arms around one another; Johnny Podres being given an Army physical; a trainer rubbing the pitching arm of Brooklyn Dodger Don Newcombe; Hank Greenberg and Virgil Trucks sharing a big hug.

“We’re more used to seeing women have intimate touch because of motherhood,” Gandolf explained. “This is not sexual. It’s like this friend thing, this heart thing,” she said of the pictures.

Many of the paintings are shipped off to Adam Baumgold Gallery in Manhattan, a gallery where her work has appeared in solo and group shows.

Baumgold has displayed Gandolf’s paintings for the past seven years. A recent piece showing Dodger pitcher Sandy Koufax holding a baseball was sold almost immediately.

In Baumgold’s view, however, “the sports angle is almost secondary. It’s more her powers of being a very persuasive artist, doing fascinating portraits of people.

“She’s trying to elicit something from the personality of the subject, and her followers are not necessarily sports fans,” he said.

“The scale of her paintings is always small and intimate. The largest I have here, I think, is 11 inches by 14 inches,” Baumgold said.

The dealer, who represents a variety of artists, said that customers are impressed that Gandolf’s works are “very well painted. Also, they’re unconventional in terms of backgrounds. Different elements are unusual.”

Joe DiMaggio, Hack Wilson and Grover Cleveland Alexander are some of the baseball subjects of Gandolf paintings Baumgold has on display, in addition to a number of boxers

Gandolf’s work also is available at C.W. White Gallery, which Christopher White and Barbara Truex opened recently at 656 Congress St. in Portland. White has not only some of Gandolf’s sports paintings, but examples of other types of portraits.

Though her subjects may be typical, Gandolf’s approach is not, White explained.

“I have a taste for the anomalous picture,” he said, holding up a triptych with a baseball player in the center, and portraits of dogs on either side. “And I would point out what a marvelous color sense she has.”

A painting of Red Sox players Williams, Johnny Pesky and Dom DiMaggio also displays a little something extra in the background – the visage of Enos Slaughter, the Cleveland player who scored the run that deprived the Sox of a World Series win in 1946.

Four of Gandolf’s paintings are on exhibit in the Portland Museum of Art’s 2001 Biennial, a juried show running through June 3.

In addition to the Podres and Newcombe paintings, there are a portrait of pitcher Lefty Grove and a painting of three minor-leaguers from Minnesota. The young fellow on the right is Willie Mays, whose hitting and fielding for the Giants later earned him a spot in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Several of the Biennial works – including all four of Gandolf’s paintings – also will be displayed in a show at the Blaine House and the Maine Arts Commission June 8-Aug. 11 in Augusta.

Gandolf acknowledges that an artistic career might be easier in a big city, but she and her husband did some thinking about where they wanted to live even before they had children.

“My husband went to college in Maine, and we were looking for a way to get out of New York,” she said. Now, they have a son in grade school and a daughter in preschool. Gandolf paints, and her husband draws “Big Nate,” a syndicated cartoon.

Gandolf has no idea whether her career might take a different direction someday, but it’s unlikely she will move into the current sports world.

“I very rarely have the impulse to paint modern-day players. When I do, it’s because they remind me of an old player,” she said. “I love the way old photographs look, and I like the old-time uniforms. It’s an aesthetic thing.”

So was Jessica Gandolf born into the wrong half of the 20th century? Does she regret not being a painter in the heyday of Babe Ruth and company?

“No,” she says firmly. “There’s no way I would be able to have this job and this life. What are the odds of that?”

Jessica Gandolf’s paintings are on display at Adam Baumgold Gallery, 74 East 79th St., New York, New York; telephone (212) 861-7338; www.adambaumgoldgallery.com; and at C.W. White Gallery, 656 Congress St., Portland, telephone 871-7282.