Every night you see people get their picture taken with the statue. “I just can’t tell you how many fans stop on their way into the ballpark to marvel at it. “It’s an awesome statue,” says Louisville Bats general manager Dale Owens. He looks uncannily alive, with his legs up, dodging the cleats of a sliding base runner as he smokes a strike to first. On the other hand, Graf installed a statue of Pee Wee Reese, the hometown Hall-of-Fame shortstop, on a pedestal in front of Louisville Slugger Field - not because Reese is held in god-like reverence, but to launch him into the air, turning the double play at second base. Graham Brown (like another hotelman Graf has depicted, Al Schneider) is placed at street level - with his shoes on the sidewalk - just the way he once greeted folks in front of his hotel. Tall, with wavy brown hair and glasses, he’s got the balance of a ballplayer, allowing him to stand up on one toe and twist himself into a pose that one of his subjects might assume. The sculptor has a string of statues dotting the Louisville landscape, and more on the way. Raymond Graf is one of the hottest artists around in what appears to be a new Bronze Age for the city. It’s the inclusion of Brown’s faithful friend that is the signature touch you get with a Raymond Graf sculpture: You find out more than how people look you find out who they are.Ībove: Jockey Pat Day at Churchill Downs, Baseball great Pee Wee Reese at Slugger Field, and Philanthropist James Graham Brown at the Brown Hotel. And it’s not Graf standing next to him, but Brown’s little dog Woozem. ”Well, it’s not actually Brown, but a remarkably accurate life-sized bronze statue of the famous Louisville hotelman in his characteristic 1940s felt hat and business suit. So we decided to include Woozem in the piece, and I think it worked out perfectly. “But I noticed that in so many of the photos he had that little dog with him. Graham Brown for me to work with, so re-creating his likeness was not hard,” says Graf. “The Brown Foundation had tons of photos of J. Raymond Graf and his natural-science menagerie in the sculptor’s Clifton home studio. He’ll be out there on the Fourth Street sidewalk with J. You can meet Louisville sculptor Raymond Graf any day of the week in front of the Brown Hotel.
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