The day I wrote about Grant Smith for the November Advocate, I had no idea the Texas Rangers would actually be playing a game this November.
Smith is an Old East Dallas resident who makes vibrant, colorful paintings, mostly using baseball as a theme. His paintings touch on the topics of racism, death and morality, and Smith has sold them, at about $5,000 a pop, to baseball celebrities including Johnny Damon.
For those of us who don’t have Johnny Damon money, Smith also sells prints for closer to $300.
Smith’s favorite ballplayer of all time is Ted Williams, who wore No. 9 for the Boston Red Sox and was a Navy pilot in World War II and the Korean War. Williams also was the first manager of the Texas Rangers in 1972.
Because of Williams, Smith likes the number nine, which symbolizes the end in numerology. It takes nine players to field a team, and there are nine innings in a game. Smith sports a “9” tattoo, his website is grant9smith.com, and the number comes up often in his paintings.
Smith also designed the artwork for the 2005 album “Healthy in Paranoid Times” by Toronto-based rock band Our Lady Peace. They recorded it in Hawaii, so Smith got to fly out and hang with them while they recorded. Pretty cool.
