Field of darkness
Artist brings somber vision to exhibition about Chicago Black Sox
Thom Ross can see the baseball players in the cornfield, but he knows most people can’t. “People walk in here and see these paintings and they say, ‘Oh, I don’t like baseball,’ ” said Ross, 66, an artist who lives in Lamy. “But the Black Sox is not about baseball, it is about human nature.”
Ross is talking about his latest show, 60-plus paintings, mostly watercolor on paper, that tells the true story of eight Chicago White Sox players who schemed with gamblers to lose the Sox 1919 World Series contest with the Cincinnati Reds. “The Black Sox — A Century Later” is up at the Dean Howell Gallery in Eldorado through Saturday, Aug. 31.
“When people reject Billy the Kid or (George Armstrong)
Custer or baseball, they have no idea what they are rejecting,” Ross said. “People get caught up in the veneer of the thing and not the heart of it. They can’t see what is right there.”
Like the shallow character in the 1989 baseball-fantasy film “Field of Dreams” who can’t see the baseball players coming out of the corn rows to play ball.
Dark side
The eight players accused of rigging the 1919 World Series, including the great outfielder Shoeless Joe Jackson, were banned from professional baseball for life. Ross does not think those men, at least not all of them, were by nature criminals. But he knows they were human. Times were tough and baseball players were not paid the astronomical sums they make today. By suspending play money from the gallery ceiling, just out of the reach of gallery visitors, Ross alludes to the temptation the Black Sox eight faced.
“People don’t like to be reminded that they are human,” Ross said. “I am the guy standing on the other side of the river telling you about the dark side. Artists very seldom address the dark side.”
The Black Sox story is at the heart of “Field of Dreams,” in which an Iowa farmer turns part of his cornfield into a baseball diamond. Fantastically, Joe Jackson, who would have been long since dead, shows up and asks if he can play there. Joe soon returns to the field with seven friends, the other banned White Sox players.
Real people
Ross’ show includes a large
painted-plywood installation depicting eight players emerging from a cornfield, a tip of the baseball cap to “Field of Dreams,” which is most people’s only connection to the centuryold Black Sox story. Despite the movie, Ross said people don’t know the backstory of the scandal. They don’t know that Joe Jackson played splendidly in the series and did nothing on the field to lose a game, but was guilty because he accepted money from the gamblers.
“‘Field of Dreams’ affected more people than the actual Black Sox scandal,” Ross said. “Imagine if you knew who those eight guys were. They were real people.”
In his show, Ross gives us pictures, painted in his distinctive abstract style, of not only the Black Sox eight but also of innocent White Sox such as rookie pitcher Dickey Kerr, team manager Kid Gleason and team owner Charles Comiskey; and of outsized personalities such as Kenesaw Mountain Landis, a federal judge who, as a result of the scandal, was appointed the first Commissioner of Baseball. It was Landis who banned the Black Sox eight from pro baseball.
Each of Ross’ paintings is accompanied by a caption that advances the story of the fix and its consequences.
“I give you the Readers Digest version of the scandal,” Ross said. “Then you can go back and see the movie and say, ‘Oh, now I get it.’ ”
But too often, people stick their heads in the gallery, see pictures of baseball players and leave.
“Americans have the intellectual curiosity of mushrooms,” Ross said.
Cowboy stuff
Ross was born in San Francisco and grew up in Sausalito, California. Lack of curiosity has never been his problem. As a youngster he was a relentless reader of history and stories of heroes both real and mythical. And then he discovered TV Westerns.
“I started watching shows like ‘Rawhide,’ ” he said. “Here are people who are packing guns and wearing hats and spurs. This was hero worship for me, but I was worshipping the myth and not the man.”
That fascination with the West carried over to his days as an art student at California State University, Chico.
“I was doing a lot of that cowboy stuff in art classes,” he said.
An instructor warned him off the Western art but relented when he recognized Ross’ devotion to the theme.
“He said, ‘You like doing that cowboy stuff? Then do it and don’t stop,’ ” Ross said.
Ross might have just kept on doing what he was doing the way he was doing it if he had not visited the Little Big Horn battlefield on June 25, 1976, the 100th anniversary of Custer’s devastating defeat at the hands of Lakota, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors. It was there on that day that Ross discovered he was as oblivious as he has come to believe most people are. Members of the American Indian Movement, denouncing Custer and the American government’s treatment of Indians, were also at the Little Big Horn that day.
“I thought everybody loved George Custer, but there were a lot of people there who didn’t like Custer or much like me,” Ross said. “You could feel the rage. I went to the Little Big Horn with that youthful arrogance that you are so sure you are right. It was all secure in my head. I knew what happened. Then I realized, ‘Tommy, you don’t know what you are talking about.’ There were these two cultures and attitudes clashing within a square mile.
“I had this epiphany. There is no one thing that is true. All things are true to some degree. I started looking at history differently. I started looking at all things differently. Things took on a deeper meaning.”
Suddenly, the fall of the Alamo, Custer’s last stand and the gunfight at the O.K. Corral were not just historic conflicts but stories representing selfsacrifice, commitment to duty or a dying way of life, and civilization versus lawlessness.
“My foundation is history,” Ross said. “I read all those books about Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp and Custer. But I started painting characters as myths, the abstraction of history.”
Dreamscape West
After his epiphany at the Little Big Horn, Ross moved to Jackson, Wyoming, where he lived from 1977 to 1986. He was in Seattle from 1990 to 2010 and moved to Lamy in 2010. For about a year or so, he owned the Due West Gallery in Santa Fe.
Back in the early 2000s, he was still doing his particular brand of cowboy stuff, which ranged from framed paintings to larger-than-life outdoor installations, one in 2005 at the Little Big Horn battlefield that portrayed Custer’s 7th Cavalry battling Indians and one in 2008, at Ocean Beach, California, that recreated a photo of Buffalo Bill Cody and members of his Wild West Show.
It was not Western art as usual.
“I am not painting the prancing pony or the cowboy riding through moonlight and sagebrush,” Ross said.
Instead he is painting Modoc Indians playing croquet, Indian warriors eating cake after overrunning Custer and his men and Davy Crockett playing a fiddle at the Alamo, all images derived from historic fact but neglected by other artists.
“If you are looking for the typical Western art of the photo realist image of a cowboy with a rain slicker on, that’s not Thom at all,” said Santa Fe’s Johnny D. Boggs, an author of Western fiction and nonfiction who writes about Western art for publications such as Western Art & Architecture, Wild West and True West. “He interprets. It is his vision of history on canvas or paper or plywood, but he does really know what happened. He immerses himself in the history. He doesn’t just read one book.”
Paul Hutton, distinguished professor of history at the University of New Mexico, owns four Ross paintings and one signed print by the artist.
“It is sort of ironic that he does essentially narrative Western art, but he is an abstract artist,” Hutton said. “And he has made a living doing that although folks who love Western narrative art don’t like abstract art, and people who are into abstract art don’t like Western narrative art.”
Hutton said he is a fan because Ross’ art sees into the power of the Western myth.
“Thom understands the real history but he also understands the need of the myth,” he said. “We both share the conviction that the legend and the myth have a power we need to preserve.”
One of the Ross paintings Hutton owns shows Billy the Kid, still in shackles, escaping on horseback from the Lincoln County, New Mexico, jail in April 1881.
To some, the Kid was a lowlife rustler and killer. But the Ross painting tells a story bigger than the Kid.
“That painting is the perfect expression of freedom, which is what the Billy the Kid story is about,” said Hutton. “The refusal to compromise. The total commitment to living the wild Western life. The Kid keeps riding across our dreamscape West.”
New trails
Even though he was making good money with his maverick breed of Western art, Ross hung up his spurs and turned to other themes. In 2006, he opened a show about Spartacus, the gladiator who led a rebellion against the Romans in 73 B.C., at a gallery in Sun Valley, Idaho. It didn’t sell.
“That gallery won’t talk to me anymore,” Ross said.
Then he did shows on World War I fighter pilots and about George Mallory, the mountaineer who died on Mount Everest in 1924. In 2017, he started work on his Black Sox show. None of these exhibits has proved to be anywhere near as lucrative as his Western work.
“Obviously my choice of subject matter has to be questioned by any sane person,” Ross said. “I’m doing shows no one else would do, shows where you can’t sell a painting. But (projects) come knocking on my door. ‘Will you do a show on me?’ When I listen to the stories of these guys (Shoeless Joe, Mallory, British flying ace Albert Ball), I get tears in my eyes.”
Ross has plans to return to a Western theme with an outdoor installation in a year or so, but now he is working on a show about Dutch Schultz, the German-Jewish-American gangster who was gunned down by other mobsters in 1935. He said he was drawn to Schultz after reading the dreamlike and poetic ramblings of the gangster’s final words.
“It’s as dark as it gets, dead gangsters,” Ross said. “This is what I do because I know I can get a reaction — even if it’s not positive. You don’t need me to show you ponies, puppy dogs and sunsets on the Tetons. When I go into a gallery and see all this happy art, I get tooth decay.”