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C Series Catalog Confessions of A Conformist Series Documents Dreams Disasters Series Early Drawings Fire Cycle Series Gatherings Series Ghosts Series Midrash Series Paper Trails Series Prophet Series Silhouette Series The Erasing Series Washingtons Profile Series Archive C Confessions of A Conformist Dreams Disasters Erasing Exhibition Catalogs Fire Cycle Gatherings Ghosts Midrash Paper Trails Prophet Silhouettes Washingtons Profile Writings Large Scale Drawings Large Scale Narrative Drawings Medium Scale Drawing Publication Small Narrative Drawings Small Narrative PaintingsThe Drawings
I don't finish drawings, I exhaust the possibilities in each rendering. I revise and rework and more than likely destroy drawings.
I draw until the figure and the environment have weight—plasticity and narrative. I draw until I find a hook that sustains my viewing for more than a couple of days. If that hook doesn't last, then I go back to revising. Whatever began the drawing–the studies, the initial idea–is started again when I pick up my piece of charcoal. These drawings are the results of those searches.
Like a drawing, view the series
I create drawings in a series. Each series starts with an idea that determines not only the subject matter but also the techniques to create it. If you like one of the drawings on this page, you should visit the complete series and view the other drawings.
The most current series are highlighted below.
Silhouettes
Unlike many artists, his stuff gets better and better. His earlier work shares a sense of stasis, futility, and despair— Hopper meets Kafka meets Sisyphus. This has given way to sheer panic and terror. There’s a dynamism in these recent drawings quite suited to this Age of Anxiety..
— John Pleshette • collector • 2024
Gatherings
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
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 Erasing
In his artist statement about his current drawing series, "The Erasing," Bailin, 62, writes: "As an artist who witnessed the waning of my father’s personhood through the dissolution of his memory, I wrestled with how to convey the devastating personal and human experience of memory loss without relying on visual clichés." The answer to that question is revealed in the creative process of the artworks of "The Erasing": draw, erase part of the drawing, repeat, repeat, repeat.
— Ellis Widner • Into The Void • 2017
Dreams & Disasters
The drawings in [this series] are ephemeral and dreamlike, […] and the figures and settings emerge out of Bailin’s marks—marks of abstraction, gesture, texture, and motion—as if surfacing within one’s consciousness out of white noise. […] His works skirt the edge of abstraction...
— Christopher Michno • Exhibition Review • art ltd, 2014
C
Bailin … presents incidents that mark a transition in ordinary lives–the ordinary lives of what seem to age 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
Paper Trails
[Bailin's] interiors and landscapes made since 2001 are as likely to resonate with texts by Eco or Borges as with anonymous images plucked from old magazines and newspapers. […] Bailin approaches each blank page as if a theatrical space to be occupied, activated. Each sheet becomes the site of a performance—Bailin’s own gestural charcoal dance and his character’s parallel search for a place, a form, a moment of reprieve.
— Leah Ollman • Catalog Essay • 2008
Lines of Thought
Drawing Conclusions Blog
Observations on Art and art process from the studio
What does it mean for a drawing to be completed
Unless I destroy the drawing first, the drawing is put in storage if I think there might be something to save. After a while, if by rummaging through the reams of rolled up paper, I find it again and I think I might be able to find some hook, I tack it back up on my drawing wall.
Charcoal Lines: A conversation with David Bailin
An interview about my history and my approach to art conducted by Cindy Momchilov, edited and produced by DoubleTroublets Productions.
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PURCHASING:
- Prices on this site are non-negotiable and shipped unframed.
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About David Bailin
David Bailin is an artist working primarily in drawing. He received Fellowships from the NEA, Mid-America-NEA, and the state of Arkansas. He is represented by Koplin Del Rio, Seattle (formerly of Los Angeles), M2 Gallery in Little Rock, Arkansas and affliated with Erdreich White Fine Art, Boston, MA.
![Garage studio located in Little Rock, AR [2001-2022].](https://bailin.studio/cms-data/blog/blog/identity-insight/image/identity-insight-sq.jpg)
