July 2, 2022

By J.P. Antonacci

Canadian Baseball Network

Sean Kane was a decade into his career as a professional illustrator when the lifelong baseball fan decided to apply his paintbrush to a most unusual canvas.

“About 20 years ago, I was going to spring training and I wanted to have something fun to bring along to get conversations started with fans. I saw a glove in the corner of my office and I just started painting goofy stuff on it,” Kane explained.

“The concept evolved from there to more realistic portraiture.”

Today, Kane’s hand-painted baseball glove portraits can be found in the permanent collections of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y., and the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, not to mention the living rooms of ardent baseball fans and former major leaguers.

His first glove portrait, painted 11 years ago, was of Cubs great Ernie Banks, an appropriate choice for the Chicago-born artist who grew up near Wrigley Field in the era of Rick Monday and Ryne Sandberg.

“Since then I’ve had the pleasure of doing work for Hall of Famers and a few major league teams,” said Kane, who ended up in Guelph, Ont., after marrying a Canadian Blue Jays fan with whom he has two children.

“My ticket to paradise,” a smiling Kane said of his move north.

Many intricately detailed portraits followed that first effort, with subjects including Shoeless Joe Jackson, Lou Gehrig, Willie Mays, Roberto Clemente, Johnny Bench, Josh Gibson, Minnie Minoso, Yogi Berra and many more.

His painted gloves have been commissioned by the Philadelphia Phillies as gifts to players like Ryan Howard and Carlos Ruiz – “Nothing like seeing your stuff on a scoreboard,” Kane said of a pregame presentation in Philadelphia – and as fundraising items at the Milwaukee Brewers Fantasy Camp.

Kane made a glove commemorating Cal Ripken Jr’s record-breaking career for a fundraiser organized by the Ripken family’s charitable foundation, and his work has also benefited Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital and been displayed at several art galleries in the United States.

Each painted glove includes a portrait based off a photograph – Kane likes choosing images that are less well known to make his portraits unique – along with graphics and text conveying the player’s career highlights and accolades.

What started as an artistic experiment has become a going concern, with Kane’s business, Sean Kane Baseball Art, now occupying the bulk of his workday.

Each glove takes over 100 hours to make, with the trickier projects requiring 120 to 150 hours. That includes the time it takes Kane to research the player in question and track down an era-appropriate glove that is the correct handedness and position.

“So a catcher painted on a catcher’s mitt, et cetera,” he said.

The gloves themselves tell a story, such as the glove on which Kane painted Babe Ruth’s portrait.

“It took me five years to find the right glove, because I wanted one that was for a lefty and from the 20s,” said Kane, who ended up with a glove made by a sporting goods company Ruth himself endorsed and is similar to a glove of the Babe’s that is in Cooperstown.

The weathered leather of a century-old glove adds wrinkled texture to portraits of early stars like Ruth and Christy Mathewson. Kane also treats the surface of each glove to make sure his painstaking work will last.

“I prepare it in such a way that it becomes a flatter surface and also helps ensure the archival integrity of the painting,” he said. “So they’ll last a long time, passed down from generation to generation.”

The difficulty of his work “varies from glove to glove, but it does challenge me,” Kane added.

Five of his gloves were part of an exhibit at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, with his portrait of Cuban star Martin Dihigo now in that museum’s permanent collection. In 2019, his portrait of St. Louis Cardinals great Dizzy Dean was chosen for the permanent collection in Cooperstown.

Kane was in St. Marys, Ont., last month for the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame induction ceremony, where he had several of his painted gloves for sale, along with prints and postcards depicting his artwork and smaller “portrait cards,” miniature portraits on circular pieces of leather cut out of old gloves.

Kane said he brought some portrait cards of “local favourites” like Andre Dawson and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. to appeal to the Canadian ball fans in attendance.

The centrepiece of his display was a glove portrait of the late Hall of Famer Roy Halladay. Kane was inspired to paint Halladay’s portrait when the former Blue Jays great was posthumously inducted into Cooperstown in 2019.

“I wanted to celebrate that, and I hadn’t painted a Blue Jays player to that point, so it seemed really timely,” Kane said.

He first found a former pro player’s Nike glove that was similar to Halladay’s. After removing the other player’s name stitched into the leather, Kane repainted over the area with Halladay’s name and career highlights, choosing to paint the hurler mid-windup and wearing a powder blue Jays jersey.

“I had the good fortune that one of the employees of the Blue Jays put it in his clubhouse office for the summer, so players and the manager got to see it,” Kane said.

Next up is a trip to Cooperstown, just as soon as the Hall of Fame there puts his portrait of Dean on public display.

“My turn will come, and I’ll be sure to make the trip over there to check it out,” he said.