On Demand Set # 19 Momentum Rising features artwork by award-winning sports artist and former MLB player Richard Sullivan. 

Configuration:

• 20 Base Cards

Richard Sullivan is an award-winning sports artist and former professional pitcher with the Atlanta Braves.  He studied at the Savannah College of Art and Design with a focus in Illustration and continued to play baseball for SCAD, the only art school in the country with a sports program. As a junior in college, Richard was drafted in the 11th round by the Braves in 2008 and pitched 6 years in the minor leagues before returning to finish his degree and continue his art practice.

His work has been accepted into the permanent collection of the National Baseball Hall of Fame, the Yogi Berra Museum and exhibited by the Louisville Slugger Museum and the Kentucky Derby Museum. In 2017 the Atlanta Braves commissioned Richard to create eighteen original watercolor paintings and twenty prints for their new stadium SunTrust Park. The paintings line the corridors of the Champions suite and the Executive Offices. The Atlanta Falcons commissioned Richard to create a portrait of their owner, Arthur Blank, that hangs in the owner’s suite of the new Mercedes Benz Stadium. Richard worked with the Braves and Omni Hotels to create nine paintings for the meeting rooms of the new Omni Hotel at the Battery Atlanta.

Presently, Richard’s goal is to connect sports fans, athletes and collectors with art. He recently became an officially licensed artist with Major League Baseball. Richard is interested in talking about how creativity and sports are connected and how watercolor painting especially reminds him of being back on the mound as a pitcher. His experiences as a professional athlete have a direct impact on his art practice. His goal is to take the experiences and feelings he had on the mound and bring them into each painting he creates.

"It is an absolute honor to work with Topps and collaborate on a set of 20 baseball cards. The set is called Momentum Rising and features paintings of bright young stars of MLBs present and future. Each player was selected because of the impact he is making on his team and MLB as a whole." Richard wanted to capture the intense moments of competition that each athlete experiences while playing.