Bailin Studio

Lectures

Presentations
Workshop

Workshops

Provincetown Art Association And Museum
460 Commercial Street Provincetown MA 02657

Figure Drawing Basics

Monday and Tuesday, June 26, 27 1–4pm

This course is for the artist who has little or no experience working from a model. You may be able to get away with a less than perfect rendering of a tin can or a tree, but everyone knows a wonky ﬁgure when they see one. However, the competence of the artist, avoiding the ﬁgure is an artistic limitation. There is nothing more satisfying and exciting than rendering a fully formed ﬁgure that doesn’t look like Gumby. This class focuses solely on rendering an unclothed and clothed ﬁgure. We use pencil and charcoal–simple materials–to achieve a simple goal: building conﬁdence and competence in your ﬁgure drawing.

PAAM workshop registration

Looking to See: Appreciating Art

Wednesdays, August 30, September 6, 13 5–6pm

You know what’s art when you see it, but what are you actually seeing? When you think about it, art is a strange contrivance. Since the 20th Century, artists have explored what a work of art is and in the 21st Century that ‘is’ encompasses mostly everything. So, what are we seeing when we look at a work of art?

In this series of lectures we remove the ‘aura’ behind works of art and give a name to all the parts to examine the building blocks–materials and structures–in creating a traditional works of art.

PAAM workshop registration

image: Barnet. Introspection [detail] • PAAM Permanent Collection

Workshop and Student References

Note: The Workshop Resource pages are password protected for downloads and special viewing.

Please contact BailinStudio for further information.

Presentations and Exhibition Walk-throughs

He Left A Paper Trail: Core Matter, Subject Matter and Object Matter

A lecture on Subject, Object and Core matter that comprise the basis of a work of art using examples from the studio. Presented at the Fort Fort Smith Regional Art Museum and at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock

–David Bailin, updated 2021

SUUM CUIQUE VENENUM

We have been meeting weekly or bimonthly for nearly 30 yrs. What links us? What makes us look forward to an interruption in our precious studio time?

—David Bailin • 2016

Filmed, edited and produced by Anna Lancaster • Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, September 2, 2015. Additional film clips by Doubletroublets Productions • Post-production by David Bailin & Warren Criswell, March 2016.

Exhibition Artist Walk Through

Koplin Del Rio Gallery: Dreams & Disasters • March 2014

Koplin Del Rio Gallery: C Series
• March 2012

Washington's Profile

Washington’s Profile contained 100 endnotes that intimated but did not state out right the main narrative of the text [a American travelogue]. In fact, the work was an attempt to create a subject through correspondence, allusion and fragmentation. It is a form of creating art that I follow to this day, albeit for a different medium: a search for meaningful relationships between disparate images and text by excavating old newspapers, magazines and books.

— David Bailin • 2014

The Pit

How do you know when you are arriving at an artistic pit? Is working in the Zone a way to avoid the pit or is it a good sign you are connected to your art? For me, the step into the pit is terrifying but the zone is worse.

—David Bailin • 2008

Edited and produced by Doubletroublets Productions
© 2008 DoubleTroublets Productions

The full video Charcoal Lines is located on the Documents page.
Image: Bailin, underdrawing [destroyed], 2012

Bailin: Criswell’s Conundrum • AETN | Loupe

This article explores the work of Warren Criswell, his themes, material experimentation and animation.

— David Bailin • 2012

image: Criswell. Flash Flood [detail]

Looking At Masters

This lecture for my drawing classes talks about how to look at masters through active interaction, understanding the importance of their use and selection of materials and the relationship of the intimate and the universal themes.

— David Bailin • 2014

image: Matisse. Artist and Model Before a Mirror [detail]

Merchandise

A writing experiment using the format of a printed catalog. The subliminal messages created by the combination of the products illustrated and the text describing it had great potential as a piece of writing and I took that as a starting point inserting my own text along with the found ones.

— David Bailin • 1983

Observation

Epiphany from the studio

Déjà vu

An artist friend of mine mentioned that as artists we really paint the same painting over and over again.

Revisions for Podium

Subject and Object matter may change but the Core matter does not. Patterns of work, approach, organization, and deep themes appear over and over again. As much as we think we make progress, the progress is a fog of technical mastery and emotional depth. What makes us artists, what drives us to spend hours in the studio, what brings us to manic highs and depressive lows? Warren Criswell calls it our addiction–the art drug.

I was looking over paintings I had made in 1972. Typical student work: attempting to make something original by negating every thing I had learned about good painting and combining two disparate styles: Clifford Still and Phillip Guston.

But what struck me was how close those paintings looked and felt to my current thumbnails. The same self-enclosed stories, the diagrammatic elements of the work and the space between each idea or impulse. This was an aesthetic epiphany.

First Meeting, 1976, Oil on Canvas, 48 x 72 inches • Thumbnail studies for Book, 2011

As artists, we change the subject matter (the story) and the object matter (the elements) but we can’t change the core matter– the indescribable and intangible chemical, electrical, biological makeup of our psyche -the conglomeration of memories and emotions that require expression.

We may never come to grasp or even understand what that core is but it remains stubbornly fixed and reinforced throughout our lives. The frustration, therefore, is how important that core is to creating our subject matter and how insignificant our subject matter is to expressing it. The art drug is the need, the compulsion, to express the core through our work so well and completely so as never to have to experience it again.