John Collins: Moonlight Graham [softcover]

Moonlight Graham gathers seven years of John Collins's nightly devotion to baseball, a 284-page record of a practice that has produced over 700 drawings since 2019. Each night during the seven-month season, Collins selects a single play from that day's games and renders it in brushwork and ink wash, a ritual completed before the next day's games begin. The book traces the series' evolution, including a 2025 shift from Arches, the classic French artist paper, to Asian rice and mulberry bark papers, whose textures loosened his mark-making and pulled the work closer to the moment it depicts. Also included are four drypoint prints, Collins's first venture into printmaking, which documents the final two games of the 2025 World Series.

The title borrows from Archibald "Moonlight" Graham, the early-1900s ballplayer immortalized in W. P. Kinsella's “Shoeless Joe” and its film adaptation, “Field of Dreams.” Graham moonlighted as a doctor during his playing days; Collins, a handyman by day, found the parallel irresistible. The book includes an essay by Ed Schad, curator at The Broad in Los Angeles, situating the project within Collins's broader practice and its unlikely fusion of sports ritual, spiritual discipline, and daily image-making.

284 pages, 272 illustrations, Softcover, 8.75 x 11 inches