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Name : Carrie Ann Baade
Place of birth: New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
Black Cat: Hi Carrie, can you tell us about yourself? What are your passions other than art? What makes you happy? What makes you sad?
Carrie Ann Baade: Art is what makes the world go round for me, but as you suggest another passion…I mine is humanity. As an educator, I am connected to guiding my students through their work and their understanding of their greater role in the world. I see artists as ambassadors of culture, prodders of consciousness, and conduits for the furthest reaches of the human experience. I have many students, who are at once many young teachers. Happiness and sadness have been vertical leaps and surrendering plummets that would be difficult for me to put into words. I reserve these lessons and answers for my what I express in my paintings.
B.C.: Can you talk a bit about your background? …And once you’re at the academy, what’s the style of teaching? …And what direction did you go with your work after school?
C.A.B.: I have been on a 20-year path to reconcile my education. I was educated at one of the most progressive schools, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Florence Academy of Art, which taught classical realism born out of the French academy of the 19th century. My masters brought me to the University of Delaware where I studied the materials and techniques of the old masters along side students of art conservation for the purpose of maintaining and preserving archaic processes that would otherwise be inaccessible to students of the 21st century. My work has been an effort to combine realism, and the world of the mind. Elements of tromp l’oeil and collage balance esoteric exploration in to mythology and spiritual visions. With every painting, I push my understanding of the material of paint and the expression of the soul.
B.C.: When did you decide painting was a career path that you wanted to follow?
C.A.B.: I was two. It was my second conscious thought.
B.C.: I am fascinated by your process to create a painting from the very beginning of your career. Can you describe to the xlgion’s readers in which way do you find the ideas of what you're going to paint?
C.A.B.: I start with a question and look for answers out of thousands of scraps of paper or I see a vision and make a quick sketch, and then go look for collage materials to recreate it. All the same, usually the vision is the answer to some conundrum that has bothered my brain. The solution to one of life’s big ineffables will flash into my mind with a poetic symbolism. It is by placing the ideas into pictures that their meaning gains clarity. As I paint from the collage, I am frequently blown away by the coincidence and accidents that could only be synchronicity, a deus ex machina, looking back at me through my work. There are instances where I have to admit the world is conscious because serendipity could not be so incidental. As I surrender more and more to chance…the works foundation is in art history… that is inherently religious and or mythological in its foundation. I like to envision what I do by cutting up art history and making new images, as a way of weaving new stories out of the past and keeping alive the world of myth.
B.C.: Why do the eyes of your characters looks like a mask and often they are crying?
C.A.B.: In my older work, I used Our Lady Sorrow and Our Man of Sorrow as the foundation for my work, 2002 to 2007 mostly. In the collage for these paintings of mine, I would cut the eyes out of historic paintings, particularly from the Primitive Northern Renaissance. These would serve as masks…often for myself, so that only my nose and mouth were visible. Through this period of my life, I was dealing with my own sadness, which is shunned in our culture. I wanted to connect with the universal and the Christian archetypes of compassion, so that I might be removed from my own personal story. In a way this is hiding, but it is also protection. I didn’t want to be petty and self indulgent about my personal pain, but to learn how to see through the eyes of universal compassion and suffering which is part of being alive. While sorrow is a constant, unending river that flows beneath us, I have now experienced the universal river of joy that flows above us and I am attempting a new and exciting challenge which is: how does one paint out of pure joy; is it possible to continually extend these periods of joy? Or is it as Robert Frost suggests: "Happiness makes Up in Height for What It Lacks in Length." According to Aesop’s fable joy and Sorrow where sisters that were chained at the waist, I have also painted about this…but I do like a challenge.
B.C.: What’s your approach to colour?
C.A.B.: I am a symbolist. I use pure color as I would use another code for what the color represents. Often, these are not aesthetic decisions so much as statements of content.
B.C.: “Explaining death rabbit”… Please walk us through the process of creating this great painting.
C.A.B.: That’s a complex one…
This painting was for an INLE themed exhibit curated by Greg Simkins. Inle is what the rabbits in the book, Watership Down, call the black rabbit or a figure of death. My connection with the novel is this: when I was a child, I thought I was a rabbit. I collected rabbits, and had an eerie obsession with Easter. My parents took me to the movie version of Watership Down not realizing how traumatic it would be for a four year old, but I refused to leave the film. If you have seen this film, you know there is a war between warrens and the rabbits bleed while fighting each other to the death. I don't think I ever thought as a rabbit after we left the theater. Therefore, when I was asked to do this painting for the exhibit, it was very significant for me.
In my painting, a woman personifies Inle by wearing a mask with an out line of a rabbit; the rabbit face is a headdress of sorts and is seen sublty in the accents in 22K gold leaf. Composing this painting was different, in that I found an image on the Internet which told me it was the key to my painting. The image was of a gothic moth insisted that it was going into my painting about a rabbit...which is peculiar to say the least. When I printed out this moth, I cut the wings in half and then reversed the image, and the head of a rabbit appeared in the design of the wings. It was a haunting and impossible solution. Perhaps the brain of an artist is crazily, advanced enough to decode and rearrange with a genius of gestalt, but you must understand I can’t find my car keys 12 times a day, so I prefer this more outlandish, magical way of thinking by way of explanation where the inanimate are anthropomorphized. I think there is magic in the world and larger forces at play; however, I am the one who misplaces my keys. Another allusion for this painting is Joseph Beuys’s performance art peice: “How to explain pictures to a dead hare. ” This performance is about the complexity of understanding art. The rabbit in the arms of the figure of this painting is holding the rabbit from the image of Beuys holding the hare from this performance. For me, “Explaining Death to a Rabbit” is a an homage to innocense that is lost in the process of understanding the larger world.
This painting is one of a triptych, each is from a literary source: Lady or Tiger by Frederick Stockton, Watership Down, and the third is the Chinese folktale The Butterfly Lovers. This has been a on going project since 2008 to investigate the relationship between literature and narrative art and relate it back to my own personal experience.
B.C.: Your paintings are very narrative. Is there always a story behind them?.. Can we consider some of them as self-portraits?
C.A.B.: They are all self portraits.
B.C.: Do you see art as therapy?
C.A.B.: I think this is something worth investigating. I think that art can be therapeutic. It is often used as catharsis) is a Greek word meaning "cleansing" or "purging". In medicine, a cathartic is a substance that accelerates defecation. So while this purification or purgation of the emotions (as pity and fear) primarily through art may bring about a spiritual renewal or release from tension…I wonder if that is a healthy way to make art for more than one helping of extreme human experience. I think it really important for myself and other artists to consider whether in sharing their experience that they are not sharing their own “shit.”
I do think it is truly important to for humans to release, and embrace the shedding of experiences that are painful…for the immediate lesson may be profound but it is in the inablility to release this thought or trauma that it is relived and so the pain of the experience lives on long past the period of learning. I am no longer convinced that my paintings are a safe place to put every negative emotion into because these are records of my experience that may outlive me and have a life of their own.
It is one thing to be part of the universal experience and another to pee in the pool. After much contemplation, I have chosen to be mindful about what I think because this informs my thoughts and actions, which informs the patterns of my life. As I have established the content of my life informs my work, I feel I have a personal responsibly for what I put into the world as it does flow almost immediately back to me. I paint, so I live and as I live so I paint. I cannot afford to be as negative as I once lived, for it left me overdrawn in my emotional bank account. I have found as I can spread love, so I receive. It was not that I was without love before but there was always at least one red sock that had sneaked into the white load of washing.
B.C.: So far what would you describe as the pros and cons of becoming a painter?
C.A.B.: I am what I am. However, as an educator of art who teaches painting and drawing, I employ the philosophy of Joseph Beuys that “everyman is an artist.” There is always room for each individual to employ a greater level of focus and intent in their day-to-day lives. To create art for oneself and/or to create art, which is a voice of, generations…we can each build more meaning and more intent in way we choose to employ ourselves in this world. What’s important for this jump in consciousness? Start with the assumption everything has the capacity to be art.
B.C.: Anything else you’d like to say? Any projects you’re working on that you want to draw attention to, or closing thoughts for the readers?
C.A.B.: “A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”― Albert Einstein
here is where you can find my work in 2012:
2012 SOLO SHOWS
Aug through Oct Since Midnight, Western Carolina University, Cullowhee, NC
April through May-Midnight Sun, MOCA, Jacksonville, FL
July Legacy 20 x 20, Palmer Lake Art Center, Palmer Lake, CO
2012 GROUP SHOWS
June- Taboo, curated by Jon Beinart, Last Rites Gallery, NYC
Visionaries; Past, Present, and Future, curated by France Garrido, Queensborough Community College Art Gallery, Bayside, NY.
May- Detailed Information, Mindy Solomon Gallery, St.Petersberg, FL
Oct- Anomalies, Copro Gallery, Santa Monica, CA
B.C.: Thank you Carrie Ann for your time and for sharing with us your original ideas! Good work!
C.A.B.: Thank yoU!
xLegion Gallery: Carrie Ann Baade
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