VL Andy Baird “The Value of Line” I was born in Denver, Colorado. There is a thing about being a long-time Colorado family, so I like to point out that I am a fifth-generation Colorado native. The first Baird came here in 1867. Colorado has always been my home, and I cannot think of any other place as home. I knew I would be an artist when I was seven. I used to watch my aunt paint horses, and I won a schoolwide art contest in second grade. After high school, I went to a commercial art school. I discovered a love for oils and figure painting, and I went to the University of <strong>No</strong>rthern Colorado for my degrees in <strong>Art</strong> Education. As a freshman, I ended up in graduate-level painting courses, along with a few required under-grad courses. By my sophomore year I had to catch up on required courses, one of which was ceramics. I was not happy, until I learned that ceramics involved using a wheel and kilns. I loved working on the wheel and my painting fell by the wayside. My master’s project was on Native American pottery, and I figured out the secret to Maria Martinez’s metallic-black hand-polished finish. My pots were hand polished, disassembled and reassembled, resulting in ancient look. By the time I became a high school teacher, galleries were selling my high-end pottery. Robert Redford bought my first pot sold in my Santa Fe gallery, and that got me national attention. When blown-glass overtook the pottery market, I returned to painting, always looking for current trends. When I travel, I visit galleries and look for interesting and intriguing art. I like to get the pulse of what the nation is thinking. I had a student so advanced that he needed new, challenging assignments. He made excellent contour drawings, so I asked him to “draw” a face by scribbling, without an outline, using chalk pastels. This became a standard assignment in my advanced drawing classes. I was inspired to work with the technique myself, using liquid paint. http://bairdstudios.com/ My high school let me paint in an empty classroom in the summer. I spread canvases on the floor and walked on them, experimenting with different paints and tools. Dribbling paint prevented the precision needed for small subjects, so I worked on large canvases. My process evolved into walking around a stretched canvas, better control over the streaming, being able to visualize the image from a distance, and creating fun, new images. My first show was a success, so I felt that I was working on the right art at the right time. My paintings are sometimes compared to Jackson Pollack’s. Long before I started this technique, I had seen reproductions of Pollack’s paintings, and I did not care for them. After seeing Pollack’s original work, I became an absolute fan. I love how the many layers of paint create depth to his paintings. There is also a connection to Chuck Close, whose pixel-like sections compose portraits, and Georges-Pierre Seurat, who used dots of paint to compose scenes. Optical blending enables the perception of the image. I might call my work “Seurat meets Jackson Pollack meets Chuck Close”. My work is a branch of the American Pop <strong>Art</strong> tradition, similar to Warhol’s Campbell Soup cans. I talked to friends, clients, and artists, and noticed what is popular in check-out lines. That led me to deliberately work with a glamour look, almost the commercial look from fashion magazines. I follow the overall Pop <strong>Art</strong> philosophy, putting art in daily life, off the pedestal. I’m selective about the images needed for that “look”. I’m inspired by ads, photos with the right light, shade and image, or students or friends with promising faces. Whatever the source, it’s up to me to create the look of popular culture in my paintings. I also paint images of things that had a big impact on my teenage years – the Statue of Liberty, the Campbell’s Soup can. I met Andy Warhol at a show in Denver. Warhol wrote a dedication to me in a copy of his book (Andy Warhol from A to B and Back Again), “To Andy from Andy”, with a little Campbell’s Soup can drawing. Meeting him made such an impression on me, and that’s why I’m so glad to be able to exhibit the Pop art character of my work. 52 | VL <strong>Magazine</strong> - <strong>Visual</strong><strong>Language</strong><strong>Magazine</strong>.com
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