He Wasn’t Painted Into a Corner

Gene Locklear was about as tall as a carrot when he decided he wasn’t going to be a farmer, not that young Locklear had anything against farming. After all, that’s what his daddy did.

You’ve heard of the figurative Tobacco Road? You won’t find it on a map, but that was where Locklear spent his youth. The name of the town was Pembroke, N.C.

There is no fast lane on Tobacco Road, but this may have been the slowest of the slow lanes. Pembroke is a few miles outside Lumberton, where Locklear was born, and Lumberton is nowhere near anywhere.

In the young, dreams are born easily in Pembroke. That is the way it is with children and dreams.

However, in places such as Pembroke, dreams also die more easily.

Locklear had this dream that might have been two dreams, except it was only one. He would grow up to be a major league ballplayer, a common fantasy among youngsters, but he would also grow up to be a professional artist. Maybe he would occasionally mix it up and hit a home run with a brush or paint a sunset with a bat, because this was a most surrealistic fantasy.

“I loved to paint,” Locklear said, “and I loved to play ball. If you had asked me when I was 6 or 7 what I was going to do, that’s what I would have told you. I’d do both.”

More precisely, he conceded, he was going to try to do both.

“As a kid from a small country town,” he said, “I figured my chances of becoming a ballplayer were probably something like one in a million. I had the common sense to realize I’d better have something to fall back on. So I painted.”

To become a ballplayer and painter, he played ball and painted while other youngsters were playing ball and playing. When he was a freshman in high school, he was selling paintings for $2 or $3 each --and playing ball.

“If I wanted two pairs of shoes,” he said, “I worked for the second pair. Painting was my way to earn money.”

He would soon find a way to earn money playing baseball. Scouts have a way of finding small towns, and the Cincinnati Reds signed him out of high school in 1969.

Of course, the money earned in the minor leagues may be enough for a second pair of shoes--but probably not a third.

“It took four years to go through the minor leagues and get to the big leagues,” he said. “In the meantime, you’ve got no money at all. You eat hot dogs and hamburgers and scrape pennies to survive--but you’re doing something you want to do and love to do.”

In this sense, art imitates baseball.

Locklear, who hit .321 for the Padres in 1975, has been out of baseball since 1980. He made the break because he wanted to get started with his “second career” rather than become one of those journeyman ballplayers who gets shuffled everywhere and nowhere.

The years since 1980 have, in a sense, been like those minor league years.

An artist’s lot is a bit different than a ballplayer’s lot in the sense that the ballplayer moves as he progresses toward the big time. In the world of art, the painter stays in his garret and his work does the moving.

“You know you have the ambition and you hope you have the talent,” Locklear said. “You want to develop to the point where your work can be presented and appreciated and criticized.”

Locklear has gotten to the point of being “presented” in a very big way. Just as he made his major league baseball debut in San Diego, he makes his artistic “debut” here as well.

More than 60 of Locklear’s works are on display at the Thackeray Gallery in Hillcrest, beginning with a reception in his honor at 1 this afternoon.

This is not the first time Locklear’s work has been presented to the public, but this is his first one-man show. Firsts are always special, whether it is a base hit or an art exhibition.

Base hits--or, at least, batters --are a big part of Locklear’s art. The majority of his work is sports-oriented, though not always baseball. There are, to be sure, paintings of Pete Rose, Goose Gossage, Tony Gwynn, Steve Carlton, Dwight Gooden and Steve Garvey, among others, but also Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Charlie Joiner, Bill Shoemaker and Jack Nicklaus.

Indeed, Locklear has turned a good section of Thackeray’s into a multi-hued Wall of Fame.

Locklear has a flair for taking an athlete and putting him in the midst of a painting, rather than presenting a mass of color and letting the observer try to figure out who is in the picture and what he is doing. The athlete stands out in the foreground and the background flows freely accenting or contrasting the foreground.

When you get Graig Nettles, you know you’ve got Graig Nettles. I like LeRoy Neiman’s work, but a lot of his paintings look like tests for color blindness.

Locklear’s other area of artistic endeavor involves Western art, mainly paintings of American Indians. He has a bit of background here as well, because he is a full-blooded Lumbee Indian.

“I wasn’t raised in an Indian cultural atmosphere,” he said, “I wasn’t raised on a reservation or even in an Indian community. My family was self-supporting, paid taxes and bought whatever land we owned.”

It might be considered incongruous, painting baseball players and Indians, but I submit that Gene Locklear has come up with the most genuinely American combination.

And this is a case where the artist himself fits so perfectly in the picture.