“The reason why I started painting sports portraits is because I didn’t want to paint my family all the time. Images of athletes were accessible, and I could just appropriate and use them."
Jonas Wood

1992 Pinnacle Baseball Rookie Card #295 Manny Ramirez

S ports has always played an outsize role in Jonas Wood’s work. His love of portraiture drew him to sports cards, whose bold typography and abstract backgrounds are elements that Wood it known to experiment with. The athletes' highly recognizable faces dominate the portraits. Wood himself has admitted however, that above the cultural connotations associated with these personalities, what drew him to this subject matter was the nature in which their images were captured in sports-related merchandise. Typically depicted in mid-motion or with emotive expressions, their representations create dynamic and iconic portraits. Manny is based on a 1992 Pinnacle Baseball Rookie card of Manny Ramirez, two years before he became an All-Star. During his 7 years with the Indians, Ramirez set the Indians' single-season RBIs record with 165 RBIs, celebrating successes continuously over his 19 season career in the major baseball league. Throughout his career Ramirez experiences numerous hardships, overcame them and ultimately become one of the best offensive tandems in baseball history together with teammate David Ortiz.

The work is a compelling example from the artist’s celebrated sports card series, in which Wood absorbs and re-contextualizes the format of the cheap and mass-produced popular culture memorabilia, imbuing his chosen images with an elevated stature. In the present work, Wood eradicated frivolous details such as lettering and more subtle areas of varied tonality, in order to bring enhanced and defined contours of Ramirez’ features. The stark contrast between areas of light and shadow is employed in such a way that further emphasizes the graphic stylisation of his subject matter, comparable to the work of David Hockney. Similarly, the choice of subject matter places Wood firmly in the trajectory of American Pop as he absorbs the format of this particular type of memorabilia, enlarging it and imbuing it with renewed permanence through his painting. Pop Art notions of materiality and iconography are thus brought to the fore in Wood’s decision to raise the status of his chosen image, from a cheap and mass produced card to a resounding and permanent ode to the baseball player. As a result, Wood’s work acts as a pertinent contribution to the discourse around notions of image hierarchy - a topic so central to post-modern theory.

Left: David Hockney, Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, 1968. TATE, London.
Right: Andy Warhol, Self Portrait, 1986. TATE, London.