ReZoom

What happens when a baseball centerfielder can't play baseball anymore? Well, Brian McCall found another calling ...From the age of six, all Brian McCall wanted to do was play baseball. "I worked at it, day and night," he recalls, more than half a century later. His determination paid off. After graduating from high school in California, he went straight to playing for the White Sox, and remained a busy and happy centerfielder for the first half of the 1960s.

 

Then his career came to a sudden halt when he was injured. "I couldn't throw anymore." he says. "It hurt to run. I was done with baseball."

Looking around at other jobs, McCall thought, "Oh, no, do I have to sit behind a desk now?" He found the prospect depressing, but he was too imaginative to wind up an embittered has-been. "What would I like to do?" he asked himself. "Where are my talents?" Even as a child, he had spent his occasional non-baseball moments drawing. He decided to attend the California College of Arts in Oakland, where he graduated in 1969.

McCall embraced art as he had baseball. After three years of commercial work, he jumped into freelancing, and has now been at it for 35 years, producing etchings, drawings, paintings, sculpture, and claymation. He lives in western Pennsylvania with his wife and their fourteen-year-old daughter, explaining that he doesn't need to live in a large city or be part of an artistic community. "Maybe it's because when you do your art, you're often going internal for things, and it just doesn't matter where you are."

I interviewed him in his home, which still shows signs of its former incarnation as a church: a kitchen where the baptistry once stood, arched windows filled with panes of colored glass, and the kind of cathedral ceiling that originally inspired home designers.

Evidence of McCall's restless imagination is everywhere. His sculptures, which these days are his favored medium, seem to be partying all over the church. Above the kitchen sink, a huge cigarette dangles from a giant pair of lips. A three-foot-tall gray-wigged John Kerry stands in a window, stripping off his shirt to reveal a Superman costume underneath. From the front of the choir balcony at the rear hangs a striking Icarus figure, bound in rope and wearing a fedora, looking like a cross between the mummy of Rameses and an old New Orleans blues singer. Is he watching us talk?

His plastic sculptures evolved from the demands of economics and physics. Considering the time involved in sculpture, McCall asks, "if you use your hands and make one object, how do you make a living?" Also, how do you produce and ship weighty sculptures? His imagination didn't want to be anchored by bronze or iron or marble.

McCall solved both problems by sculpting inexpensive blocks of polystyrene that weigh almost nothing and can be worked quickly. He carves out figures, then covers them with gluey paper to create a surface friendly to paint—resulting in the gorgeous extravagance of his colors and textures. (Additional mages of his work can be viewed on his flickr page.)

McCall is skeptical about elitist notions of creativity as some kind of higher inspiration. "How is a watercolor somehow more ‘creative' than a brilliantly designed spreadsheet?" he asks. As if to emphasize his next thought, McCall leans forward and adds, "But I think there IS a great resurgence in the search for the self."

Michael Sims is the author of "Adam's Navel" and other nonfiction books, including the forthcoming "Apollo's Fire: A Day on Earth in Nature and Imagination." He writes for The Washington Post, L. A. Times, and many other publications.