Beginnings
Paul and I came up with the concept of the Tarot de Cooperstown in early 1983. Paul told me one night at his apartment on 6^th Street that he wanted to design a deck of playing cards, using bats, balls, gloves and bases as the suits. I suggested that a tarot deck would be even more splendid. We became very enthused immediately. Paul took out a tarot deck that he owned – one of the Tarot de Marseilles decks (hence the name for ours) and we used that for guidance as we started planning what images could appear on which picture cards.

The paintings
Once we decided on our baseball iconography, we did small drawings. I worked them up larger, then stretched 78 canvases, each one 14" x 26". I mixed and applied a gesso that made the canvases look weathered, made eight different colored batches of acrylic paints, drew outlines on the canvases in dark brown Prismacolor, and spent a good part of the rest of ’83 painting the Tarot de Cooperstown. Once completed, they spent most of their existence in cardboard boxes in my apartment. Three of them were featured in a traveling exhibit put together by the Smithsonian, which toured the world from 1987-1992. Our own interest in them was rekindled this year, when Seafirst Gallery in Seattle agreed to hang all 78 of them as part of their exhibit celebrating the opening of a new, major-league ballpark there.

For more information...
Click on the menubar at the top of this screen, scroll to the bottom of the homepage and click on the link there to send me email. The paintings now live in my apartment again, but they've been moved into a pair of new crates that Paul and I made in order to ship them to Seattle. We'll gladly ship them again, the next time their presence is needed somewhere!