Contained in the surreal world of Andrew Baines

The Covid lockdown knocked folks round in myriad methods, however for Andrew Baines, its merciless blow was that the town’s artwork suppliers all of a sudden ran out of his hallmark blue acrylic paint.

“I felt as if my throat had been lower,” he declares, nonetheless reeling on the unexpectedness of all of it.

Simply as folks rushed out and purchased canine in the course of the lockdown, a lot of them picked up paintbrushes and tried their hand at interest artwork, unwittingly stressing provides.

With out his beloved Matisse Ultramarine blue, Adelaide’s wildly imaginative exponent of the blue-sky, blue-sea scene couldn’t go on together with his commissions and gallery-exhibition work.

He tried, however a substitute blue was not “his” blue. So, within the  acrylic blue drought, the prolific painter simply stopped portray.

“I needed to flip to drawing and considering of recent concepts,” he says.

Some sellers had been suggesting they want to see a change from his bowler-hatted and besuited males and the cows within the sea, so his mind was already stirring.

Baines describes his thoughts as a whirling pot of untamed concepts on the quietest of occasions. He wonders if its hyperactivity is a type of insanity. He is aware of different folks don’t suppose the way in which he does. There’s a vanity, self-hate dichotomy in play. His inventive agitation each powers him and troubles him. He’s dubbed his newest present The Seek for Sanity.

“I’m undecided if I’m inventive or endure from delirium,” ponders the surrealist painter.

Baines is a lean, angular man, good-looking together with his neat Van Dyke beard.

His Grange studio is in a transformed yard workshop, simply a brief stroll from his favorite hang-out, Joe’s Cafe. Its air is wealthy with the scent of paint. Cleaned brushes are neatly set out drying on a cupboard beside a painting-in-progress which itself is drying on an easel. There’s a hair-dryer on the ground. Nicely-used paint cloths additionally lie on the ground, which is protected with aged tarpaulins. Buckets comprise colored water ­– blue, in fact. Canvases of varied sizes are stacked in opposition to the partitions. He’s getting ready for an imminent one-man present at BMGArt.

Baines’ inventive output doesn’t cease at portray. He’s a person pushed. He writes. He makes motion pictures when he can. He networks with the media and retains a excessive profile on social media. He has written and revealed his personal pocket artwork ebook, Museum of My Thoughts, full with “quotes that will help you escape actuality”. The droll quotes are Baines-style titles for work, quirkily sensible of their approach: Don’t imagine every part you suppose; What in case your actuality is definitely an phantasm?; I took the street much less travelled and received bogged; I’ve absolutely succeeded in not having the ability to discover myself; Creativeness can see what our eyes can’t.

Now, out of the blue, so to talk, the entrepreneurial “quasi surrealist” painter has emerged with a brand new interval. As Picasso had a blue interval, the blue-loving Baines now has a cat interval so as to add to his cow interval and his bowler-hatted interval. He paints cats casting their shadows on island beacons. Typically there’s a misplaced soul standing there with a cat; typically there’s a bicycle which may go nowhere. The extra he performs with the theme, the extra arresting and puzzling the pictures develop into.

“Cats and canine!” he says.

“They know precisely what’s happening on the market however folks deal with them like idiots. They’re a metaphor.”

Baines has been portray seaside scenes for many years. He did, in any case, develop up on sublimely lovely strands: Grange Seashore with its gentle blue hues of shallows between sandbars grading out to vivid marine blue depths, horizon etched in opposition to an uplifting Australian sky blue.

Within the early days, the younger Baines painted lyrical bathing belles on the seaside. Sarcastically, it is a topic he’s revisiting. Now they’re flying belles, magnificent, lithe diving creatures, caught mid-air.

The American replica market has been an enormous boon. It might probably’t get sufficient of our Baines. “Digital prints,” he exclaims. “They pay royalties.”

Whereas he’s joyful to get his head round particular commissions, he’s additionally pushed by an inside muse who, most of the time and whether or not she likes it or not, is his spouse Jacqueline. In a wierd approach, Baines’ canvases are his counsel.

And amid the surrealist seascapes stacked in opposition to the wall in his studio, there’s an enormous, darkish work exhibiting an enormous machine picture of such intense complexity that the attention can’t cease reaching into its twisting element. He jokes that it’s a “portrait of his marriage”.

He entitles work with quips similar to: “She prayed that he’d by no means come again however he all the time did.” It’s a wickedly droll wit which provides pause for thought.

All his work, he says, are autobiographical in a method or one other – commentaries on life and love, on his personal sense of self.

Baines is a kind of uncommon painters who has discovered success in their very own lifetime, and it isn’t so simple as one might imagine. He has been in a position to purchase a dream house which may make him really feel a bit grand on the finish of a working day, a house that he feels he has been in a position to give to his spouse as an announcement of success. He says that whereas she loves the massive home, the ever-increasing calls for of success are one other story.

“She kind of misses our lives as they had been earlier than,” he laments. “Easy.”

Joe, of Joe’s Café, tutored Baines in learn how to act each time chauffeured politicians arrived on the magical seaside cafe for morning espresso. “He instructed me to observe, to smile and to giggle, however to say nothing.”

The technique labored. The VIPs favored the deferential seaside artist who frolicked at Joe’s. They favored his artwork. They made commissions.

Now, everybody who’s anybody, it appears, needs Baines to color their portraits.

His favorite fee up to now was from John Dawkins, the previous Liberal MLC. Dawkins commissioned a portrait which now hangs in Parliament Home. Baines is agog that he, “a working-class boy”, has a spot within the hallowed halls of Parliament. Since his topic was a person of the nation, a sheep farmer from Gawler, Baines gave him sheep and wheat fields as a background, delivering a portrait decidedly not like the traditionalist canvases which bedeck these hallowed halls; as he places it with unrestrained pleasure, it “stands out like canine’ balls”.

If Baines summons, they may come. That’s how he achieved his large and fairly weird seaside installations: the bourgeois professionals en masse, all wearing black, all getting moist and standing patiently within the shallows as he traces them up and takes pictures;  Alexander Downer on the seaside inside a pink door body; politicians on bathrooms; judges confronting un-judgeable huge horizons of the ocean; London’s bowler-hatted tube travellers within the Antipodean sunshine; besuited businessmen within the frothy shallows; and musicians approach out of their consolation zones.

If he calls for brief canine, they arrive in hordes. Baines loves canine, particularly sausage canine. He paints canine towers: canine on high of canine on high of canine.

Then there are his unheard-of herds of cows. From research of cows beneath jetties and cows within the shallows, he has given the bovine a political voice. Cows on seashores with their necks prolonged and their lips pursed are “conspiracy cows”. They’re satirical cows, a  silent bellow on the mayhem of faux information and harmful conspiracy theories.

The extra you set on the market, the extra issues occur

Baines has all the time been a ferocious self-promoter, and his offbeat installations make for sensible gentle reduction within the dour world of the every day information cycle. The media is assured to concentrate. And publicity means gross sales and commissions.

However, in fact, there stays the artwork institution and the caustic eye of the intense artwork critics ­– one other flea within the ear of this complicated painter.

Main artwork critic Sasha Grishin, writing in The Canberra Instances, stated Baines’ bowler-hatted males didn’t have  the “haunting enigma” attribute of the good Belgian surrealist René Magritte. He wrote that Baines’ work “are straightforward on the attention and never too taxing on the mind” and “light-hearted vignettes of absurdist concepts”.

Baines was lower to the core by this. However he has to acknowledge, nonetheless grudgingly, that he’s not the primary artist on the planet to be rebuffed by “the outdated guard”. Folks love him nonetheless. His work please them. And because the works meet the artwork public sale rooms, costs are up.

No, he’s not Magritte. He’s Andrew Baines, an completed draftsman whose works will not be solely arresting to the attention and provocative to the thoughts, but additionally very fastidiously usual with offbeat concepts imposed upon backgrounds of impeccable geometric precision.

Baines says Andy Warhol, David Hockney, Ken Performed, Professional Hart and Jeffrey Good are the artists he has all the time most admired.

“I noticed in them a life I needed,” he says. He discovered it. Now he drives a Mercedes convertible.

This, from the electrician’s son born in Colchester, Essex. Baines, together with his mother and father and brothers, migrated to Adelaide to start a brand new life at Grange, whence Baines has barely moved ever since. It’s his sacred place with the ocean his muse and expensive outdated Joe’s Cafe, now adorned with Baines’ murals and mannequin dachshunds on the roof, his well-known espresso spot.

He went to high school down the street at Grange Main and up the street at Seaton Excessive. Portray was all the time the massive factor for Baines from a wee age; he went on to courses at Henley and Grange Artwork Society aged 10 and by no means actually appeared again. A sojourn on the SA College of Artwork was helpful however it interrupted his early employment as a business artist doing backdrops and window shows at John Martins, together with the Magic Cave.

By 1983, he had began his personal Baines Graphic Arts firm and was getting work from the F1 Grand Prix, BP Australia and the Soccer Federation, in addition to doing cartoons and murals. Not that he stopped portray. By 1999, Jaqueline instructed him it was time he throw within the towel with the day job and pursue his actual dream – and so it got here to go that Andrew Baines commenced his extraordinary trajectory as knowledgeable painter.

Now, as he gazes on the sea, he once more ponders his place on the planet: “I didn’t suppose folks knew about me or cared… The thriller of life. I like the thriller of life.”

He talks of the emotional scars he carries on behalf of his late mom; a mum of three and housewife who beloved to color.

However, he declares, he actually loves his widowed father. “Dad is now 84 and lives at Grange in a unit. He sits there watching TV surrounded by three portraits I’ve painted of him as entries into the Doug Moran Prize. Dad doesn’t realise that he’s residing in a memorial to himself.”

Baines is represented by quite a lot of high galleries and has work in collections all around the nation and abroad, however has but to be displayed on the Artwork Gallery of SA. He has entered and been a finalist in quite a few prestigious artwork prizes, but nonetheless ready to crack an enormous one. One other portrait of his dad is probably due.

In the meantime, he has been appointed an artwork advisor to the UN and is engaged on a Concord Day idea in regards to the micro-plastics within the ocean. He has dedicated himself to 2 charities a yr and takes charity work very significantly certainly. He’s eager to help something which helps the homeless, dreaming up an idea of metropolis statues of homeless trolley girls full with QR codes telling their tales.

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“I imagine in karma,” he says. “If I assist folks, good issues occur to me. The extra you set on the market, the extra issues occur.”

In his studio, Baines powers from canvas to canvas, every paintings fastidiously sketched and measured, as neat and exact as the person himself. He’s diligent as a result of he’s formidable. There may be all the time extra market, extra viewers, extra publicity, and extra acceptance.

And, regardless of the critics and sellers could say about making adjustments, too dangerous. That ubiquitous outdated bowler hat on the pristine Adelaide seaside is just not going away.

“They’re my trademark,” he says. “If folks nonetheless need them…”

He laughs. Perchance, all the way in which to the financial institution.

Andrew Baines’ new solo exhibition, The Seek for Sanity, might be at BMGArt from July 15 till August 6.