"The Timeless Charlie Hustle and The Geometry of a Rose"

 

   Lately an inspiring amount of success with my baseball art sales has me digging back into the subject with the realization that there remains a great deal of interest in the legendary Pete Rose - - so this month of March 2017 had me putting on my figurative sorcerer’s cap and creating this painting of him pushing his stardust. With my added imaginings of mud to dust, streams of stars, and red 'n white blooming colors, the painting is based on a few historic photographs of America’s All-Star "Charlie Hustle" doing one of his famous head-first dives into base. 

   Like other projects and subjects, I have painted some baseball players in the past sort of impersonating them through form and color as a means to actively exercise and channel my own artistic energy.  I wrote more about this in my blog “Hope Springs Eternal on Opening Day” where I explained, for example, that for my first baseball player art, “I had done a painting of Aroldis Chapman using him as a subject to imagine if a ‘painter’ were a ‘pitcher’.” Another example could be found with my painting of Joey Votto where I explained that, "I called this painting "Paint it Black" because that was Votto's at bat song, but to me, I was relating the feeling of walking up to the plate as similar to the feeling of facing a blank canvas."  Find my Joey Votto notes in the blog: "Paint It Black"  ( More of my baseball art can be found on my facebook page: Cincinnati Reds & Bengals Art as well as an art page called Tides of Eternity Art by Chrissy Breslin Schroeder. )
 
   This time, when digging into the baseball player subject in my painting of Pete Rose, it was the form of shapes that impressed me most. From the thrown pitches aimed into a boxed target zone to its aligned hits onto a perfect diamond, I have always understood baseball to be a game of strict geometry.  So, in view of this understanding of baseball as geometric structure, I had to ask myself why then, when playing with some preliminary sketches for this painting, did my pencil repeatedly sweep spiral shapes onto the base of every sketch I made.
 
   As I kept working through some loose sketches of Rose, I continued to wonder about this spiral shape that kept reappearing in the space of the base until my curiosity sparked my memory of my long ago high school geometry class; and somewhere way down in my mind surfaced a lesson about Phi, or The Golden Ratio and its Golden Spiral.  In geometry, it is through the expression of the golden ratio that the spiral shape is formed and can be found throughout nature, most notably in the form of a rose.  - - From this remembrance came the title of my painting, “The Geometry of a Rose” and the basis from which I spun my composition. ( Art prints available here in Etsy shop. )
 
   In the world of baseball, Pete Rose (nicknamed “Charlie Hustle”) remains a legend for being recognized as one of the most outstanding baseball players of all time with the most hits in history.  He is also known for being, at this point in time (this winter of 2017), denied admittance into The Baseball Hall of Fame for betting on baseball. 
 
   After spending a considerable amount of time playing with this painting on some of these cold days in March and contemplating the subjects within it, I started to think that, in a way, ball players, mathematicians (who created the language of geometry), and artists have something in common in their continued attempts to uncover the endless patterns of the universe despite the limits of their human condition.

 "The spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, has ceased to be vicious; it has been set free."   - V. Nabokov
 

"The Timeless Charlie Hustle
and
The Geometry of a Rose"

Video of the Process:

 See *Cincinnati Reds and Bengals Art by Chrissy Breslin Schroeder Page* for:

​"The Timeless Charlie Hustle and The Geometry of a Rose"  Rock ‘n Roll Music Video

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​*New Blog about some Baseball Art created in the early summer of 2017:
​"Number Eleven and the Four Elements"

​ ** For more *Big Red Machine* works and blogs see my old
"Colorful Success" 
and 
“Pieces in the National Bobblehead Hall of Fame and Museum”

…as well as:
​"Bench Number Five ~ The Earth is a Baseball" 
​which I created in the Spring of 2018.

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***Also, "My Wire-to-Wire Summer with Twelve Stars and A Piece of American History"

****And: "Hope Springs Eternal on Opening Day"

*****And now in 2020, "Opening Day Delay"
​

Also find more artistic studies on the scrolling geometric shape of spirals in the late summer blog from 2024 linked below:

“Hats On for Our Grandmothers, for Our Suffrage Era Ancestors, and for Ancient Columns of the Ionic Order"

and
​
“Air to Water: The Revolution of Ten Koi”
​​

Reflections On This Artwork 8 Years After Creating It:

My facebook memories are bringing synchronistic vibes as this baseball art reappeared in a timely manner with universal reflections of mine on the alarming current news of this day in April 2025.

A screen shot of my artwork that I posted on April 15, 2017 and what I wrote about it on this day of April 15, 2025:

“I instinctively created this painting 8 years ago inspired by many things. In retrospect, I recognize the most universal aspect about it was the sense that our country's government was threatening the balance of democracy making me feel driven to hold out hope that America could find a way to save herself from the chaotic, abusive and evil forces of a fascist leadership that has continued to grow in power every year since and, for those who are aware of what is happening in the US and around the world, is becoming undeniably more dire each and every day as government ruled concentration camps are now on the radar.” #fascism #whoissafe #peterose #thegeometryofarose #tidesofeternityart