Abstract Pastels - Bret Bailey |
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OM Gallery - 917-923-3251 |
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Artist's Statement |
Bio |
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Making their debut By Paul Smart Bret Bailey's nervously kneading his shirttail at the center of a bright Rhinebeck gallery filled with his brightly swirling, pastel abstracts. It's his first show, the first time he's really shown any of his work to more than his girlfriend, and Bailey's excited. The room ebbs and flows with a constant movement of friends and acquaintances of Anne Boylan, the director of the Boylan Gallery on Montgomery Street, located where a gas station/auto showroom once stood, as well as a number of people seeking a respite from the late winter doldrums. The work itself has a naive quality. Each piece flows like an obsessed doodle drawing. Framed without matting, the crenulations of the artist's notebook from which the pages were ripped still show. Variation from one untitled piece to another is minimal. And yet it all has an undeniable charm and underlying sense of new energy. And Bailey himself is a hoot, nervously grinning ear to ear at the center of his first show. He explains that it all came about as a fluke, really. His girlfriend lives in the Rhinebeck area and has kids in the same school as Boylan. They go to talking and the girlfriend mentioned Bailey's artwork to the gallery director, who was looking to fill a late winter slot. The fact that Bailey worked in pastels was great, Boylan said, because that's what she'd opened the gallery with one year earlier. This would be like an anniversary event. "I'm very excited," Bailey said. "Getting ready for this was so consuming, I’m feeling a bit dizzy now." Bailey, a web designer by trade, talks about how the costs involved in getting his work ready for gallery presentation took him by surprise. "Oh my god!" he says, hands crunching the royal blue cotton of his shirt, straining its buttons. "Thank heavens we went with the mismatched frames that I was able to pick up from antique shops and the like." He notes that after taking art classes in elementary school and high school, he didn't pursue anything artistically creative until four years ago, when a sudden urge to work overcame him. He started with pastels a year later. Now he dreams of finding some way to make his living in the medium. "Hopefully, this will all consume me more," he says, blushing and grinning simultaneously. "I love the boxes pastels come in, and buying the paper, and getting to use my fingers and the ball of my hand. I guess I like the sensuousness of it all." He adds that each work conjures up an emotion or person, which is why he's named the show, "People, Moments and Moods." "When I can't think of anything I think of Stephanie, my girlfriend, and I start to work in purple. Then everything starts to swirl." The small red dots next to each piece's ID tag that denote a sale start appearing towards the evening's close. What does Bailey feel about such things? "Part of me thinks, oh my god, I'll never see that one again. It's like losing a member of my immediate family," he says, pulling on his fingers now. "But I love them! They remind me of the feeling you get when snow starts piling up when you're a kid, and you just know you're about to get a snow day!"
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