John Collins – Moonlight Graham No. 178, 2020

John Collins
Moonlight Graham No. 178, 2020
Ink on paper.
10 x 8 inches
Image size: 7 x 5 inches
Illustrated in: Creation date: 04/17/2020
Winning team: Pirates
Featured player: Roberto Clemente
Inventory #11683

Collins’s Moonlight Graham series are devotionals to baseball. Imagining his identity as 'Moonlight Graham,' a newspaper comic illustrator, Collins highlights a play or story of interest every day from within the baseball world. He creates these works on a fictional deadline because within this fantasy, his drawing would appear in the next morning’s sports section next to the baseball scores and standings. The name Moonlight Graham reverberates with multiple meanings. It was descriptive of his own creative act of moonlighting--these were created at night after working on his studio paintings or handyman jobs. It is also a pun on social media: Moonlight (nightly) and Graham (Instagram). Lastly, as a nod to baseball fans, the name is recognizable as the name of a baseball player in the early 20th century who became a household name thanks to W. P. Kinsella’s novel, Shoeless Joe. The baseball player received his nickname because he moonlit as a doctor during his playing days, which Collins found a nice parallel to his own project.