"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, “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
 

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" 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"Bench Number Five ~ The Earth is a Baseball"  which I created in the Spring of 2018.

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

****As well as: "Hope Springs Eternal on Opening Day"

*****And now, "Opening Day Delay"