Three Women • 1992, 2020 [Charcoal on Paper • 39 x 59 inches]
I began Three Women in 1992, inspired by Pompeii and Roman decorative frescos where small images were painted within huge expanses of background framed by ornate decoration. It didn’t resolve for me then but something about it had promise. I put it into storage. There it remained until, while reviewing my Covid sketchbook in 2020, it appeared on one of my pages-a ‘ghost’ from my past. I took it out of storage and revisited the drawing.
—David Bailin • drawing description • A Divine Comedy Catalog • 2026
About the Artist
DAVID BAILIN is an artist working primarily in drawing. He earned his MA from Hunter College in New York and his BFA at the University of Colorado, Boulder and received fellowship awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the NEA / Mid-American Arts Alliance as well as the Arkansas Art Council. The Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts Foundation Collection in Little Rock AR, The Visual Arts Center, Sioux Falls, SD, and the National Jewish Museum in Washington D.C. are among the number of private and public institutions that have acquired his work. Bailin received critical reviews in ARTnews, Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, the Oxford American Magazine, Art Ltd and other periodicals, and was the subject of a 2008 documentary entitled “Charcoal Lines.” A retrospective of Bailin’s drawings was exhibited at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock in 2025 and at ArtYard, Frenchtown, New Jersey, in 2026. Bailin’s work is profiled in the fourth edition of Drawing Essentials by Deborah Rockman, published in 2020 by the Oxford University Press, and Creative Practices for Visual Artists by Kenneth Steinbach, published in 2018 by Focal Press. Little Rock Soirée magazine spotlighted the artist and reproduced Intrusion, in their March 2025 edition. In 2014, The Arkansas Times weekly selected David Bailin as one of Arkansas’ Visionaries.
Bailin is represented by Koplin Del Rio Gallery, Seattle, WA (formerly Los Angeles, 1982 - 2015), and M2 Gallery, Little Rock, AR. David Bailin currently lives and works in Wellfleet, MA.
Gatherings • 2022 – 2023
I dislike crowds. They make me uncomfortable. Especially groups of people congregating around a single idea or ideology. They are the Cossacks that terrorized my ancestors and who terrorize us now. This series shows only the gathering. What threatens them is rarely real but it is they who haunt my dreams.
— David Bailin • 2022
Fire Cycle • 2019 – 2020
After several years working on the large-scale Erasing Series, I'm drawing small. The poem, The Fire Cycle, by Zachary Schomburg from his book Scary, No Scary, published by Black Ocean Press, 2009, inspired me with so many visual ideas of solicitude and sublime immolation that I couldn't resist exploring his brilliant vision.
The Last • 2015
From his early Holocaust drawings,[…] to his series of Biblical scenes set in the midcentury, to today's erasings, works that reference the loss of memory and personality, Bailin's narratives offer us a way to think about the human condition. We can be cruel, we can be banal, and eventually we aren't anymore.
— Leslie Newell Peacock • Bailin. Criswell. Peters • 2015
C • 2011 - 2012
Bailin … presents incidents that mark a transition in ordinary lives–the ordinary lives of what seem to be minor captains of industry or their mid-level subordinates–to something outside the ordinary. Drawn in charcoal (and coffee!) on large sheets of paper, Bailin’s rough-hewn but beautifully detailed pictures present us with men in crisis–that is, men who seem to have grasped that their crises have overcome them and require resistance or escape.
— Peter Frank • Haiku Reviews • Huffipost.com, 2012
Celebrations Series • 2001 – on-going
From 2001, I drew Bar and Bat Mitzvah invitations for my nephews and nieces using the passages from the Torah or Haftorah as inspiration. As my family has evolved into wedding and birth announcements I have continued to honor this generation with CELEBRATIONS, a labor of love.
— David Bailin • 2014
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