Baldwin Township artist helps launch Vintage Grand Prix with painting of Paul Skenes

Today’s toast of Pittsburgh sports is about to be immortalized in art.

Paul Skenes, the rookie who is the first Pirates pitcher in 49 years to start a Major League Baseball All-Star Game, will be the subject of a live acrylic painting by Baldwin Township artist Kait Schoeb at a July 26 prelude to the Pittsburgh Vintage Grand Prix.

Her work during the Black Tie & Tailpipes Gala at Downtown’s PPG Wintergarden is based on a photo of Skenes, who will be with his team in Arizona that evening. After its completion, the portrait will be put up for auction to benefit Grand Prix charity partners.

“Originally, I was just going to do the skyline, because we wanted to have something broad to appeal to everybody,” Schoeb said about the oft-captured Pittsburgh panorama.

But with Skenes performing historically significant feats on the mound for the Pirates, the gala organizing committee decided he’d be an eminently suitable subject.

“Then when I saw he got the All-Star game, I was like, sweet!” the artist said. “And then when I saw that they had him starting, I was like, oh, this is perfect. This is perfect.”

As a full-time artist with her a business called Paints By Kait, Schoeb has produced portraits of plenty of prominent Pittsburgh athletes, including Sidney Crosby, Troy Polamalu, Andrew McCutchen, Hines Ward and Jaromir Jagr.

“Painting people is definitely my favorite subject, and I really love realism and painting in oils, so that’s kind of my bread and butter,” she said.

She uses acrylics for live paintings because they allow her to finish a painting much more quickly than her preferred medium.

One of her early works in oil is of a bus driver named Kletus. Her Baldwin High School art teacher, Jane Riccardi, suggested that a photo of him would make for a good project for Schoeb to work on between 11th and 12th grades.

“I didn’t want to paint over my summer. That’s the last thing you want to do when you’re 17 years old,” she admitted. “I wound up doing it, but the whole time I didn’t have my teacher behind me saying, ‘Change this. Do this.’ So I didn’t know how people were going to react to it.

“It wasn’t until I came in my first day of senior year that Mrs. Riccardi almost fell off her chair.”

With the portrait making such a positive impression on the teacher, “She entered me into everything that she possibly could, and I wound up either winning first place or taking the entire show and getting best in show,” Schoeb recalled. “So that’s when it hit me that I was like, oh. I’m really good at this. But it still wasn’t something that I thought could be a career path.”

Further encouragement and recommendations came from pastel artist Linda Barnicott, best known for her paintings of Pittsburgh landmarks, including this year’s “The Place for Smiles” to help celebrate the 75th anniversary of Eat’n Park.

“Linda was the first person I saw who was doing artwork as an actual career and succeeding at it,” Schoeb said. “I’ve met A-list celebrities, and that’s fine. But meeting Linda, I was shaking in my boots, because I’m such a huge fan of hers.”

Schoeb relocated to Seattle for a while, but she returned to her hometown because of health issues within her family.

“I’m over the moon that I’m back, over the moon in every aspect of my life,” she said. “It’s so much better that I’m here.”

Through networking, she met Black Tie & Tailpipes Gala volunteer Jessie Tait, who recommended Schoeb for this year’s event.

And despite their subpar record for the majority of her lifetime, she’s happy that her subject turned out to be a player for the Pittsburgh Pirates.

“I’m a Buccos fan, through and through.”

For more information about Paints By Kait, visit paintsbykait.com.