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Without a doubt, my favorite work; my meisterwork if you will, is
Joe DiMaggio. The face, the pose--everything was right.
Here is Joe DiMaggio well on his way to looking like I imagined.
Notice the belt buckle moved around all the way to the side. That was a
Yankee dressing custom. In most all of the shots of Babe Ruth, you will
not see a belt buckle. That's because as rude and crude as the Babe was,
he dressed like a dandy and actually cared a lot about his appearance. He
liked that belt buckle all the way on the side so that it would not show.
Other Yankees of that time followed suit. I'm not sure of the origin of
it, but Ruth is a loyal practitioner of it. Here, Joe has not quite hidden
it completely and that way, I don't have to field the questions about it.
While Joe went well, the photos didn't. One of the
persistent challenges with this business is that photographs almost always fail
to capture the essence of the piece. This photo shows the attempt to get
good, solid daylight with which to photograph the statue. The only trouble
was the sun was out and there's too much contrast. You need a cloudy day.
Like this one.
Here was a little secret revealed. One of the reasons, I
discovered, that the statues don't photograph well is that they eyes die and
appear flat and have no depth to them. Even though an airbrush is employed
in the painting scheme, it still happens. On this day, we used women's eye
makeup to darken the eye sockets and then sprayed dullcoat over it to fix it.
Here I am applying the elixir.
