Fine art baseball mitts a hit with collectors
Artist uses leather as canvas to transform gloves into sports memorabilia
GUELPH — They’ve caught countless pop flies, screaming liners and hard grounders. Now, far from the dirt and grass of a ball diamond, they sit stacked in Sean Kane’s basement, waiting for his brush.
Kane, a native Chicagoan, takes baseball gloves and turns them into fine art. His work has landed in museums, on Hall of Famers’ mantles and in the homes of collectors who don’t blink at paying thousands for his oneof-a-kind mitts.
For a lifelong baseball fan, making a living celebrating the stories of some of the game’s greats is about as good as it gets, he said. Even if he never intended for things to turn out this way.
“My own baseball career was three seasons in Little League, barely hitting the ball out of the infield. I’m much better with a paintbrush than I am a bat,” he joked.
“I had to find a way to keep it in my life.”
Kane’s basement workshop is stuffed with piles of old catcher’s mitts and baseball gloves that he’s sourced from antique dealers and eBay. Baseball history books sit on a shelf, not far from the lifelike faces of Dizzy Dean, Bob Uecker and Yogi Berra, trapped in time on their leather canvases.
A Chicago Cubs jacket hangs on the wall, behind a paint-splattered apron. His jeweller’s magnifying glasses are nearby, although he’s been told he really shouldn’t be using them anymore, or else risk damaging his eyes.
“My optometrist discouraged me from doing that,” he said.
Baseball gloves aren’t the easiest material to work with, Kane said. First he has to seek out vintage gloves from the right era and style the player used. Sometimes the condition of the mitts makes them unusable. Newer gloves need to be dried out with rubbing alcohol before he can begin to paint, and each one has its own unique creases and challenges.
“Sometimes, I’m wishing I was painting on a square canvas,” admits Kane, who still manages to put an astounding level of detail into his images. “But I really like it as a surface. The older gloves really accept the paint beautifully.”
It takes about 40 hours to make one of his pieces, from researching the player, sourcing the right glove and reference photographs, then designing the artwork and making the portrait. He makes about 20 gloves a year, many of them on commission from former players, major league teams or diehard fans looking to give a unique gift.
He’s depicted Don Larsen’s perfect game, using a catcher’s mitt and pitcher’s glove. He used three catcher’s mitts to tell the story of Casey At the Bat. From Shoeless Joe Jackson to Willie Mays to Babe Ruth to Johnny Bench, he’s done them all.
Kane started making his unique glove art after going to a spring training game in Arizona in 2001. He brought along a glove he’d painted with baseball images “to hold my drink.” Tony Gwynne, the San Diego Padres’ legendary hitter, saw it and loved it.
But it would be years before Kane realized his painted glove idea might actually be something people would pay good money for.
“It was the goofiest thing,” he said. “Tony Gwynne laughed and signed it and said ‘that’s really cool.’ Then I came home and promptly hung it on my wall for about 10 years. It was always the thing people commented on the most when they came into my studio.”
Eventually, looking to take his career as a designer in a new direction, he started to refine the baseball glove concept and began making more polished versions. One of his first gloves, a Jackie Robinson tribute, caught the eye of a Los Angeles Dodgers executive, and got him into baseball’s inner circle.
“For a long time, I resisted being a sports artist. I see myself as a portrait painter,” he said. “I recognize now that people who collect baseball memorabilia, they’re just as passionate as people who go to museums or art galleries. It’s just that their art gallery is a man cave in the basement.”
His business continues to grow. Kane’s gloves have been featured in the National Pastime Museum, the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, universities and at fundraisers for teams and players’ private foundations.
Next, Kane plans to celebrate some of Japanese baseball’s biggest stars. Butler University in Indiana has commissioned him to do a big exhibit using 100-year-old gloves that will tell that state’s history in baseball.
As a kid, baseball gloves were just something he used to play catch with his dad. Now they’re something that has him earning praises from Major Leaguers, both current and retired.
“My 10-year-old self would be pretty excited,” he said. “To see how people have responded to this, it’s been amazing.”