Painting diamonds: Meet the British artist who learned to love baseball in Korea

Baseball

Published: 17 Nov. 2023, 16:32 Updated: 17 Nov. 2023, 16:41

Painting diamonds: Meet the British artist who learned to love baseball in Korea

A painting of Gocheok Sky Dome in western Seoul by British artist Andy Brown, inset. [ANDY BROWN]

The crack of the bat, the yells of the crowd and the smell of oil paints drying in the sun. That’s a typical day at the ballpark for Andy Brown, a renowned British artist who has built a career out of capturing fast-paced sports in one of art’s slowest mediums.

An increasingly well-known figure in the baseball world, Brown has spent the last decade committing diamonds to canvas. He made headlines earlier this year when he appeared at the World Baseball Classic as a member of the British team — quite possibly the only official team artist in international sports.

In 2019, he visited every single MLB park in a single season and painted the action. He did something similar in Taiwan a year earlier, and just recently he was commissioned to produce a book of paintings catching the action in the Dominican league.

All of those projects brought a lot of attention from local and international media, as well as from the players themselves. Brown’s artwork now hangs in galleries, museums, club houses and the homes of players, and it’s easy to imagine that his current work chronicling the resurgence of British baseball could one day earn its place in the annals of the sport.

But what often gets overlooked is where Brown’s baseball journey began.

Born and raised in Britain, Brown grew up about as far away from the baseball world as you can get. While the sport’s popularity is on the rise there today, Britain in the 1980s and ‘90s was all about football, rugby, cricket and tennis.

Sajik Baseball Stadium in Busan [ANDY BROWN]

It was not until he moved to Busan — initially as a maternity cover art teacher — in the late 2000s that Brown really began to discover the beauty of the ballpark.

“The first time I went would have been the end of March or the beginning of April, 2009,” Brown told the Korea JoongAng Daily in an interview on Oct. 15. “That was the first time I went to a baseball game.

“Karim Garcia was playing in right field for the Giants, and I think they might have been playing either the Kia Tigers or the Heroes.”

That experience in Busan started what would eventually become a career in baseball. Brown is now probably the foremost baseball artist in the world, but it was the atmosphere he found at Sajik Baseball Stadium that first attracted him to the sport.

Andy Brown holds a painting of the field at Jamsil Baseball Stadium in front of the same view from the stands at Jamsil Baseball Stadium in southern Seoul. [ANDY BROWN]

“The nature of Korea at times is that people are so polite and so friendly, but that means sometimes you don’t really see them opening up,” Brown says. “I feel like the stadium in Sajik was where I could see everybody dancing, singing and letting go. I felt like all facets of the culture were on view for the first time.

“It was a window into a culture, a society, that I wanted to be a part of.”

Brown stayed in Korea for a decade, swapping Busan for Seoul after three years. It was after that move that baseball started to become a bigger part of his life.

“I wasn’t a regular attendee initially,” Brown says. “I’d go now and again, learn a little bit more about the game and see a little bit more.

“I guess by the time I moved to Seoul I started going more often. In Seoul you’re spoilt for choice: We had Mokdong for the Heroes and Jamsil for the [LG] Twins and [Doosan] Bears. You could get over to the Wyverns in an hour, to Suwon in an hour or down to Daejeon easily.”

Jamsil Baseball Stadium in southern Seoul [ANDY BROWN]

Brown’s time in Korea saw the Heroes, now the Kiwoom Heroes, through some major changes following the club's foundation in 2008.

If he did see them play at that first game in Sajik in 2009, the team would have only been known as the Heroes after a naming deal went wrong the previous season. By the time he made it to Seoul, the club had become the Nexen Heroes, the name they would carry until the end of 2018 when they became the Kiwoom Heroes.

The Heroes played out of Mokdong Baseball Stadium in western Seoul until 2015, when they moved to the newly built Gocheok Sky Dome. Mokdong is currently not being used by any KBO team, although it could be pressed back into service in the coming years with the possible redevelopment of Jamsil Baseball Stadium in southern Seoul, home to the Bears and Twins.

“I’ve always loved Mokdong,” Brown says. “I was a Heroes fan and that’s my favorite stadium. That and Sajik because it was the first one.”

Sajik and Mokdong are also where art first started to become part of Brown’s baseball experience.

Suwon KT Wiz Park in Suwon, Gyeonggi [ANDY BROWN]

“Painting wasn’t the first thing,” he says. “It was little drawings. Before the game I’d get to the ballpark and do a little drawing. Usually the gates opened two hours before the game, so I’d set up somewhere and do a little drawing in my sketchbook.

“Quite quickly they became paintings. Mostly on paper to begin with. They were quite small — the noticeable difference between the Korea stuff and everywhere else is the scale. Korea tends to be smaller because it wasn’t until later that I started taking in an easel.”

Brown is very clear how impactful the KBO was in his career. Long before the ESPN interviews and the Dominican books, it was here that he first honed his craft, learning not only the rules of baseball but also how to commit that to canvas.

“My journey took me from being a British guy that was interested in baseball and interested in Korean culture to a guy that loved Korean baseball and loved Korean culture and the paintings are that journey.

“To me, Korea was like my apprenticeship. It’s where I learnt about baseball, learnt about the culture and learnt how to use my art within it.

“I started looking in at a different culture that I was not part of and then eventually I was painting from within that culture. It speaks of my journey, my understanding of the world.”

Andy Brown, left, poses with former Lotte Giants infielder Andy Burns and a print of his painting of Sajik Baseball Stadium in Busan. Burns was the first professional baseball player to buy one of Brown' paintings. [ANDY BROWN]

It was also in Korea that Brown saw the first glimpse of a professional opportunity.

“In Korea it was really a hobby and an interest, and then it started to get a bit more professional. There was this painting I did outside Sajik, and after I’d painted it Andy Burns and Brooks Raley got in touch.

“That was the first time somebody from professional baseball reached out to me and wanted to buy a painting.”

Andy Brown, right, poses with former Lotte Giants pitcher Brooks Raley and a print of his painting of Sajik Baseball Stadium in Busan. [ANDY BROWN]

That shift from a hobby to professional painting can also be seen in the actual artwork.

Looking through Brown’s archive of work, it’s clear that the KBO paintings are a bit more rough and ready, a bit less polished, than his more recent work. That’s a product of his learning process, Brown says, but it also serves to reflect the difference in the different leagues — the cruder nature of those early paintings effectively symbolizes that frenetic energy that KBO crowds bring to the game.

“To me the paintings are about capturing the experience of the game,” Brown says. “It’s my experience of those two and a half hours. It’s the people coming into the stadium, the people you notice in the crowd.”

The action on the field is less important. While the result will change how he feels about the experience and creep into the artwork through the atmosphere of the crowd around him, Brown says he is never looking to capture a single moment on canvas.

Hanwha Life Eagles Park in Daejeon [ANDY BROWN]

He always puts the visitors at bat, allowing him to paint the entire home side in the field. He works his way around the diamond and the outfield as the game goes on. Adding each player based on their stance and what they’re wearing, rather than what they actually do.

Specific members of the crowd will often also make it in.

“The paintings are an expression of the experience on the day,” he says. “It’s a matter of what’s important to me on that day, what have I noticed. That’s the personal experience of it.

“Sometimes I’ll have an interesting conversation with somebody and I’ll paint them in. On a lot of the Korean ones I used to hide things in the paintings. On the advertising boards I’d put things that were going on in my life, or it might be politics or an important date or the person I was with.”

From a Korean perspective, Brown’s work also captures a snapshot of the KBO at a specific period of time. He has, unintentional though it may be, produced an archive of the mid-2010s Korean baseball experience, capturing on canvas the atmosphere at ballparks that are either no longer in use or had only just opened.

Andy Brown, left, poses with former Los Angeles Dodgers ace Park Chan-ho. [ANDY BROWN]

Both Mokdong in Seoul and Masan Stadium in Masan, South Gyeongsang, feature in Brown’s body of work but are no longer in use in the KBO. Like the Heroes, the NC Dinos moved to their new stadium Changwon NC Park ahead of the 2019 season, leaving the old Masan stadium entry next door.

Brown also painted Hanwha Life Eagles Park, home of the Hanwha Eagles, in Daejeon, Jamsil in Seoul and Sajik in Busan, all stadiums with possible renovations or rebuilds planned in the near future. Gocheok Sky Dome and Daegu Samsung Lions Park, meanwhile, were both painted in their opening years, with fans still adjusting to the new ballpark experience.

“The older stadiums play into this collective sense of identity,” Brown says. “I used to love going to Mokdong because it felt like you could sense other people’s footsteps. Other people had been there before you.

“The new stadiums don’t have that, but you have that new beginning, those new memories. I do love the old ones, but then the new ones do also show how the culture is changing. It shows the current mindset.”

Andy Brown stands next to a collage of his Korean baseball stadium paintings in his studio at his home in England on Nov. 16. [ANDY BROWN]

Brown hopes to get back to Korea and paint the KBO again, capturing how he’s changed, how Korea has changed and how baseball has changed in a new set of paintings.

“I’d like to go full circle, having started in Korea and where I am now, I’d love to come back and do it again.

"There must be about 40 or 50 paintings of Korea. I’ve got such a lot of work there that has never really been seen and I’d love to get it up in front of people.

“I did a book in the Dominican Republic last year with 103 paintings. It’s like a whole chronicle of the season. I’d love to do something like that in Korea. That’s my dream.”

BY JIM BULLEY [jim.bulley@joongang.co.kr]