GEORGE BAYLISSRecent Paintings 2009

Cover: Yellow Shore Oil on Canvas 40” x 50”2007

Opposite: Orange Slope Oil on Canvas 14 1/4” x 15” 1999 (private collection)

GEORGE BAYLISSRecent Paintings 2009

This catalog has been published in conjunction with the exhibition

George Bayliss, Recent Paintings, 2009 at the Turtle Gallery, Deer

Isle, Maine 04627 in August, 2009

ISBN 0-9626935-5-3

Publication copyright © 2009 George Bayliss

Essay copyright © Carl Little

All rights reserved. The images and text in this catalog may not be

reproduced, except in accord with the US copyright law and by

reviewers of the public press, without written permission form the

authors or publisher.

www.turtlegallery.com

www.georgebayliss.com

03FOREWORD With great pleasure we present a highlight of our 27th season at the Turtle Gallery: A Selection of Recent Paintings by George Bayliss.

When I first met Bayliss at Parson’s School of Design in New York City in the 1960s, he was an academic admin-istrator who spent as much time as he could spare in his own studio. Now, four decades later, his work, which has taken center stage in his life, is filled with a marvelous breadth of experience and vibrancy.

For nearly half a century Bayliss has absorbed the land-scape and given it back to us on canvas. This exhibition bears witness to Bayliss’s ongoing love affair with paint. As an abstract colorist, he relays to us his love for the landscape. He is possessed by a sense of the place he inhabits.

Among his other talents, George is a gardener, a builder of habitats, a restorer of buildings, and a fine cook . We are fortunate that he continues to share his life-affirming vision with the art lovers who come to the Turtle Gallery.

We are grateful for this wonderful presentation and for the thoughtful and perceptive piece by friend, poet and essayist, Carl Little.

Elena Kubler, August 2009

Opposite: Frenchman Bay Study Oil on Canvas 9” x 13” 2008

Green Head IIOil on Canvas 30” x 30”2007

Eastern BeachOil on Canvas 40” x 40”2001

Opposite: Stable and Three StonesOil on Canvas 60” x 72” 2005 (private collection)

Mount Desert Sky Oil on Canvas24” x 24” 2008

Opposite: Orchard MoonOil on Canvas24’ x 36”2000

Growing up in Washington, D.C., George Bayliss remembers visit-ing the National Gallery of Art as a young man, encountering paint-ings there that shook him to the quick. Manet’s The Dead Toreador (1862–1864) was one of them, a depiction of a bullfighter lying on the ground. “It absolutely knocked me out, the foreshortening of the lower legs,” Bayliss recalls. “I couldn’t get over how beautifully Manet had done that with mere paint.”1

Bayliss fell into art as a romantic, with classical instruction part of the early mix. One teacher, a student of the French realist William-Adolphe Bouguereau, taught him antique cast charcoal drawing. With some dread the painter recalls the “seven-hour study of the bust of Cicero,” yet the discipline served him well—and eventually drove him to embrace the freedoms of modern art.2 He also learned to love paint, even the goopy Maroger’s medium his teacher pre-ferred. On visits to another Washington art landmark, the Phillips Collection, Bayliss became entranced with modernism. He gravi-tated toward Nicolas de Stael, Karl Knaths, John Marin and Pierre Bonnard, their canvases testaments to the energy of paint and the dynamics of composition.

Bayliss ended up studying with two formidable modernists, the Provincetown painter Herman Maril (1908–1986)3 and Cranbrook Academy of Art professor (and president) Zoltan Sepeshy (1898–1974).4 In their landscape and figural work, both artists drew on the vitality of Abstract Expressionism. Bayliss followed suit, imbuing his imagery with an expressive abstraction all his own.5

Early on, Bayliss connected with the landscape. Exploring the docks and boatyards in Georgetown, he was “infected” with the idea of marine forms. In drawings and watercolors, he rendered ships’ hulls, the bottoms of boats, rudders and other elements of the waterfront scene. Over time, landscape became the pri-

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Mount Desert Sky Oil on Canvas24” x 24” 2008

Opposite: Orchard MoonOil on Canvas24’ x 36”2000

GEORGE BAYLISS: The Pleasures Of PaintBy Carl Little

mary focus. Bayliss painted a variety of environments, includ-ing the Chesapeake and the Adirondacks (where he has had a camp since 1964). He also became obsessed with Civil War battlefields, struck by a compelling paradox: some of the worst carnage in American history had taken place in these pastoral settings. Several paintings of the Dunker Church6 at Antietam epitomize his response to this disconnect. In a 1996 canvas, the small plain church floats atop undulating fields. Without be-ing overstated, the image conjures the turbulence of the past.

In Maine, which Bayliss began visiting in 1963,7 the connection with the landscape is, in his words, “almost purely visual, begin-ning with the light and the ambience.” The sun setting beyond an island, the fog rolling up Eggemoggin Reach, winter sea smoke—these and other phenomena activate paintings that dazzle with daring color effects and compositional pizzazz.

The coast offers a myriad of motifs, which Bayliss treats with a lively and improvisational brush. In Autumn Islands, 2008, a sin-gle tree rises from a vivid red foreground through the center of the view, partially obscuring a trio of ragged, spruce-clad isles. While tuned to the season’s colors, the palette is the painter’s invention. Red Nun and Northern Lights, 2007, exemplifies the painter’s ex-pressive approach. A broadly abstracted coastal prospect con-sists of a bright yellow foreground, a light blue sea with dark veins of ledge across the middle, and a streaming red curtain of sky at the top—the aurora borealis putting on a show. The red nun of the title, a marker to aid ship navigation, tilts slightly on the horizon. Bayliss is not a plein air painter. “I get more freedom when I’m away from the subject than I would were I plunked down paint-ing in front of it,” he explains. On his travels along the coast, he makes sketches on site and then refers to them in the studio. Carney Island and Inlet

Oil on Canvas30” x 30”2008

Working from the drawings frees him to take license with the mo-tif, to pursue an expressive realism not dictated by the facts in front of him. A number of Bayliss canvases combine the sharp geometry of houses and barns with the curving lines of the land. Paintings like Orchard and Barns, 2008, and Green Head, 2007, are built around color, including bold red rooftops, and dynamic shapes. The panache of this approach recalls certain Marin com-positions where “lines of force” energize space.

A sense of the voluptuousness of paint has stayed with Bayliss over the years. “If you treat it right, make it fat enough,” the paint-er explains, “it behaves almost like a skin.” While he will at times lay on a lot of paint, Bayliss also works with thin washes, which lend translucency to the image. “I vary the surfaces a lot in each work—nothing seems like it is preordained,” he notes. Bayliss’s early fascination with boatyards carried over to Maine; indeed, in recent years, it has led to some of his most impressive can-vases. Boatyard Forms, Sheds and Hulls and Boats and Sunrise, from 2007, and Boatyard IV, 2008, capture the vibrant milieu of the working waterfront. Fishing vessels have been hauled up for cleaning and repair, the hull of each “character boat” offering an opportunity for spirited interpretation. “When all is said and done,” Bayliss has stated, “for me painting is color.”8 His palette is often provocative. The painter points to his friend, the late Abstract Expressionist George McNeil (1909–1995), who made choices in color that went against the grain. Bayliss can be equally ornery, finding virtue, as it were, in the vice of vivid hues. “The element of risk is a lot more exciting…than to be safe and do the same thing again and again,” he notes.

“Most of my paintings are excuses to apply color and create shapes in ways that are more and more arresting and more and

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Dunker Church Evening Oil on Canvas30” x 30” 1998

Woodshed, Tree, Reach Oil on Canvas15” x 17” 2004

Opposite: South Mountain Oil on Canvas30” x 24” 1997 (private collection)

11more alive,” Bayliss concludes. That is the challenge he presents himself every time he steps in front of a blank canvas. Now in his sixth decade making art, this exceptional modernist speaks the language of painting with eloquence and flair. We listen—and we look—with great pleasure.

Carl Little is the author of The Watercolors of John Singer Sar-gent, Edward Hopper’s New England and other books. He lives and writes on Mount Desert Island.

Notes: Unless otherwise noted, the citations from the artist are from an interview with the author, October 29, 2008. “Constraint has some value even though it’s perverse to say that. It kind of gets you all bound up and then getting loose of that is such a wonderful feel-ing of freedom.” Ibid. Maril was the subject of a major retrospec-tive, “An Artist’s Two Worlds,” at the Provincetown Art Associa-tion and Museum in August 2008. “Sepeshy fused concrete reality with a judicious abstraction to create works that are intellectually intriguing and expressively suggestive.”James Houghton, “Zoltan Sepeshy Remembered,” exhibition catalogue, Muskegon Museum of Art, 2002. “Abstract Expressionism went through the population of artists like the plague.” Conversation with the author. Bayliss has never lost his admiration for such artists as Richard Diebenkorn, Bradley Walker Tomlin and Robert Motherwell, who motivated him early on to pursue abstraction. “The Dunker Church pictured was erected by German pacifist Baptists who had fled conscription in Prussia and wound up in the Blue Ridge of Maryland. The church became the center of the terrible day’s battle and the irony of it has always haunted me.” George Bayliss, email to the author, Oct. 26, 2008. For many years, Bayliss and his family rented a place in Stonington, down the road from painter Stephen Pace. In 2003 he and his wife purchased a house on the Old Ferry Road in Deer Isle and now spend about half the year there.

Blue Rock Reflection Oil on Canvas40” x 40” 2008

Opposite: 40 Acre Cornfield Oil on Canvas50” x 60” 2000

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Opposite: Red Shore Oil on Canvas24” x 30” 2004 (private collection)

WorkboatOil on Canvas24” x 30” 2004 (private collection)

Autumn IslandsOil on Canvas40” x 40”2006

Opposite: Two BarnsOil on Canvas 40” x 50” 2000

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Opposite: Sea Smoke and Tide Race Oil on Canvas30” x 40” 2005 (private collection)

Sheds and HullsOil on Canvas24” x 36”2007

Red Woodshed Oil on Canvas60” x 72” 2008

Opposite: Blue Hill Twilight Oil on Canvas40” x 50” 2007

Opposite: Sand Beach Tidal Pool Oil on Canvas30” x 40” 2008

Pleasant Valley Slope Oil on Canvas30” x 30” 1998

Born in Washington, DC in 1931

Educated at University of Virginia and University of Maryland, BA, 1955

Cranbrook Academy of Art, MFA, 1956

Exhibited in over 200 group exhibitions since 1950 including:

Baltimore Museum of Art Annual Exhibition of Maryland Artists,

1954,1955

US National Collection of Fine Arts Washington Watercolor Club Annual,

1953,1954,1957

South Bend Art Association “Michigan-Indiana Artists Annual”, 1956

Corcoran Gallery of Art Washington Artists Exhibition, 1951,1955,1956

Detroit Institute of Arts “Michigan Artists Annual Exhibition”, 1960,1962

Ball State University “Annual Drawing and Small Sculpture Exhibition”,

1956,1958,1971

Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center “New Accessions, USA”. 1958

Akron Art Institute Annual Artists May Show, 1958

Isaac Delgado Museum of Art, Art Association of New Orleans Annual

Exhibition, 1955

Xavier University, “Young America, ’59”, 1959

Butler Institute of American Art “24th Annual Midyear Show”, 1959

Kalamazoo Art Center, “Drawings by Michigan Faculty Members”, 1960

Flint Institute of Arts, “31st Area Artists Show”, 1961

Corcoran Gallery of Art, “Four Washington Painters”, 1958

University of Kentucky, “Twelve Washington Artists”, 1958

Corcoran Gallery of Art, “Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American

Painting” 1955, 1959

Silvermine Guild of Artists, First National Print Exhibition 1956

Birmingham Arts Festival, Bloomfield Hills, MI 1962

Midland Civic Center—Michigan Artists Exhibition 1962

Parsons School of Design, NYC—Faculty Paintings 1965

Chautauqua Institution, “11th Annual Exhibition of American Art”, 1968

GEORGE BAYLISSSelected Biography

Dunker Church Study V Acrylic/Gouache 8” x 14” 1994

Lever House, NYC, “University of Michigan Artists” 1978

State University of New York at Albany, “University Artists Exhibition”

1969

Norfolk Museum of Arts and Sciences, “American Drawing Biennial

XXIII”, 1969

Central Michigan University “Painting Invitational”, 1980

Kresge Art Center, Michigan State University, “Eighth Michigan

Biennial”, 1983

Maine Coast Artists Gallery, Rockport, ME “Mainely Painting—Artists

Who Work in Maine”, 1983

Webster College, Loretto Hilton Gallery, “Cross Country—Artists

Who Draw”, 1981

Deer Isle Artists Assn. Gallery, 1983

Telfair Academy, Savannah, “The Fine Arts in America—the Telfair

Collection”, 1983

MB Modern Gallery, NYC, “Sacred Matters: Works on Paper”, 1996

gWatson Gallery, Stonington, ME, 2004

Courthouse Gallery, Ellsworth, ME, 2008

Turtle Gallery, Deer Isle, ME, 2006, 2008

Selected solo and small group exhibitions include:

Artists Mart Gallery, Washington, DC, 1954, 1955, 1957

Artists Market Gallery, Detroit, 1955

Arts Club Gallery, Washington, 1956

Dels Gallery, Bethesda, MD, 1956

Akron Art Institute, 1957

Ross Widen Gallery, Cleveland, 1958

Jefferson Place Gallery, Washington, 1958, 1960

Flint (MI) Institute of Arts, 1961

AAA Gallery, Detroit, 1961

State University College, Potsdam, NY, 1962

Michigan State University, “New Trends”, 1962

Gordon’s Fifth Avenue Gallery, NYC, 1963

Rockefeller Arts Center, SUNY Fredonia, 1971

Forsythe Gallery, Ann Arbor, 1974

Rackham Galleries, University of Michigan, 1976

Albion College, 1978

Norman Miller Gallery, Cincinnati, 1979

Slusser Gallery, University of Michigan School of Art, 1981

Zriny-Hayes Gallery, Chicago, 1977, 1979, 1981

Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, “Reflections on Antietam

and Gettysburg”, 1988

Babcock Gallery, NYC, Three Person Show, 1996

MB Modern, NYC, “Shared Passions”, 1996

MB Modern, NYC, “Antietam—The Landscape as Elegy”, 1997

MB Modern, NYC, “Spirit of Nature II”, 1998

MD Modern, Houston, “Something for Everyone”, 1999

Turtle Gallery, Deer Isle, ME, 2005, 2007

Represented in the permanent collections of the Corcoran Gallery of

Art, Akron Art Institute, Albion College, the University of Michigan, State

University of New York, Telfair Museum, University of Chicago, Ford Mo-

tor Company, Hallmark Corporation, Ann Arbor Trust, Sloan-Kettering

Institute, NYC, First National Bank of Baltimore, Continental Bank of

Chicago and others as well as private collections in the US, Europe and

the Far East.

EMPLOYMENT

1956–57 Exhibits Designer, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC

1957–59 Instructor, Akron Art Institute School of Design

1959–62 Instructor, Flint Community Junior College

1962–63 Assistant Professor, State University College at Potsdam, NY

1963–67 Acting Dean, Parsons School of Design, NYC

1967–72 Assoc. Professor and Chairman, Department of Art, State

University College at Fredonia, NY

Winter Cove, Evening Oil on Canvas28” x 48” 2008

Dark Harbor, Fishnets Oil on Canvas32” x 48” 2007

Opposite: Dunker Church and Fields Oil on Canvas60” x 72” 1996

1972–74 Professor and Chairman, Department of Art, University

of Michigan

1974–84 Dean, School of Art, University of Michigan

1984–89 Dean, Tyler School of Art, Temple University

1989–95 Professor, Department of Painting and Sculpture, Tyler

School of Art

1995–Emeritus Professor of Painting, University of Michigan, Tyler

School of Art

OTHER ACTIVITIES

President, National Association of Schools of Art and Design 1981–84,

fellow and life member; Chairman, Nominating Committee, College

Art Association, 1983–84; Selection Committee for Art and Art History,

Fulbright Commission, Council for International Exchange of Scholars,

1981–83; listed in Who’s Who in America and Who’s Who in

American Art.

Meadow and Reach Oil on Canvas20” x 26” 2006

Opposite: Orchard and Barns Oil on Canvas40” x 54” 2008

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Opposite: Harbor EveningOil on Canvas10 3/4” x 16”2007

Boats and SunriseOil on Canvas16” x 24”2008

Red Nun and Northern LightsOil on Canvas40” x 40” 2007

Opposite: SchoonerOil on Canvas40” x 40” 2008

Opposite: Frenchboro I Gouache 11” x 15” 1999 (private collection)

Frenchboro Ferry Pastel 11” x 15” 1999

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Boat and Sea IVAcrylic, pastel/d’Arches 22” x 30” 1982

Opposite: Two Trees and Yellow SeaOil on Canvas 18” x 22” 2009

Opposite: Surf Acrylic/Paper 11” x 14 3/4” 2000

Soft Day by the Sea Oil on Canvas63” x 93” 1982(Hallmark Corporation Collection)

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Amanda Garcia, Catalog Designer

ArtFly Advertising, www.artfly.com

Custom Museum Publishing

Rockland, Maine, Printer

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Opposite: Sails on the Reach Acrylic, collage/board11.5” x 16” 2009

Back Cover: Three Red Trees Oil on Canvas14” x 14” 2006 (private collection)