Baseball portraits, no gum
Blake Jamieson, who grew up an A’s fan, puts his own artistic spin on trading cards
When pop portrait painter Blake Jamieson began expressing his appreciation for his favorite Bay Area sports teams, he started with San Francisco Giants catcher Buster Posey in 2015. As a street artist, he hit the town with some spray paint to bomb walls near the team’s home turf.
“I made a Posey stencil, and I spraypainted some buildings around the stadium in San Francisco with it,” Jamieson recalls by phone from his art studio in Brooklyn. “I only did that a couple of times, and then I realized … there’s a pretty bad penalty if you get caught and convicted for vandalism in California.”
Last month, Jamieson decided to resurface that image — this time legally — through Project70, a limitededition art series by Topps, the leading producer of sports cards. He recreated the portrait of the catcher on one knee as tradingcardsize collectible art, selling 2,155 copies in 70 hours.
Now the onetime A’s seasonticket holder is paying homage to another Bay Area great, Oakland A’s Hall of Famer Rickey Henderson, with a bold portrait based on Topps’ 2015 card design.
The 36yearold is one of 51 artists and public figures participating in Topps’ Project70 series. Snoop Dogg, painter and former UFC Octagon Girl Brittney Palmer and rapperchef Action Bronson are among the Project70 creators, as are Antioch native and popsurrealist illustrator Alex Pardee and streetwear influencer Oldmanalan, who lives in Sacramento.
As part of Project70, they’re tasked with reimagining 18 Major League Baseball player cards and two wrappers from the trading card company’s
70year history. Each product is 2.5 inches by 3.5 inches, the size of a baseball card, but on premium cardstock about an eighth of an inch thick and housed in a clear plastic case. Three cards are released every weekday on Topps.com and are available to purchase for $19.99 for 70 hours. Jamieson has 16 cards remaining in the set, with this latest Henderson card available through Thursday, May 6.
The Novato High School alumnus earned a degree in economics from UC Davis. He parlayed that into digital marketing work just as companies started adopting social media strategies.
“It was like the Wild West, where every brand knew they needed to figure out Facebook, but they didn’t know how,” he told The Chronicle by phone from his studio in Brooklyn, N.Y., noting a similarity to the exploding market for the NFTs (nonfungible tokens) that Jamieson is currently creating separately from his Topps project.
Using bold colors and conveying the artist’s positive outlook on life (“Stay awesome” is his motto), Jamieson’s portraits have gone from corporate and pro locker room settings to the mass market. The lifelong baseball card collector got his professional start at a studio he built in a barn on his parents’ 2acre property in Novato. (Jamieson’s father, Patrick Jamieson, who designed and operates his son’s website, is still based in Novato, as is his sister, Tess Kress, who works as his assistant.)
“Blake started showing an interest in drawing not long after he started to walk,” Patrick Jamieson recalls of his son. “By the time he was 6, he often carried a clipboard with paper or a sketchbook and drew whenever and wherever inspiration struck.”
But Jamieson went through the usual motions, landing a 9to5 in marketing until burning out on the office job lifestyle by age 30. That’s when he decided to go back to his artistic roots, starting with portraits for office spaces, including Hint water in San Francisco and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in Redwood City.
A meeting in 2017 with NFL player