Peter Bailey

By: Tobin Bennison

Article Category: Skilled Labor

There are many episodes in Melbourne Beach artist Peter Bailey’s life story I find fascinating, but my favorite has to be the one that finds his teenage incarnation standing rapt in front of an impressionist painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

If you follow willful adolescent logic, he really shouldn’t be there. He should be out with his gang of friends, who at that particular moment were most likely wandering through Brooklyn or Queens looking for some hell sorely in need of raising. But for Bailey, this palpable painting of a horse auction holds his attention with a more immediate sense of life than the reality found out on the streets.

The title of the painting and the name of its creator are forgotten now, but in a way that’s immaterial. For the sensations it triggered still resound in Bailey’s mind today, some 40 years later. “You could hear the sound of the crowd when you looked at it,” he says, recalling the powerful image. “You could smell the horse sh*t.”

Even before that day though, Bailey found himself drawn to the visual arts. His mother, an art major, had a small photography studio in the basement and hand-tinted many wedding photos with a toddling Bailey on her knee. He remembers his grandmother giving him a paint set one year which kept him busy down in the basement during the evenings. During the day, he was outside with his leather-jacketed pals playing hockey or jumping subway turnstiles to seek adventure in the city. “I was a closet painter,” he says. “They didn’t know till much later what I did in my spare time.”

On Wednesdays, back in those days, the Met was free, and Bailey would go there religiously to bask for hours in the glory of the French impressionists and salon painters he still counts as favorite inspirations. “I liked Van Gogh, of course, but I loved all of it,” he tells me. “The art that really struck me though were those French painters who achieved the greatest perfection of form and realism without the use of photography.”

In imitation of his idols, Bailey began painting still lives and the everyday objects he saw in Manhattan.  After working for a short time as an undertaker, he became a New York City police officer. Harlem was his beat. “I saw many miracles during my time there,” he remembers. “I’d go home and attempt to capture them.”

After retiring early due to an injury, Bailey, now married with children, turned to carpentry and gardening to hasten his recovery, though still painting on the side. It was during this period that he got involved with the Huntington Art League on Long Island, making repairs on the building in exchange for tuition. Hitherto, Bailey had worked mainly with oils, but under the tutelage of some teachers he still remembers fondly, he tried his hand at watercolors.

“I was always covered in paint when my wife and I first met,” he says. “I switched to watercolors partly because of my her — she was getting tired of the mess — but also because I developed an allergic reaction to linseed oil, which every oil painter relies on.” While odorless varieties of the solvent exist now, the very memory of the scent makes Bailey cringe.

Then, as now, in many artistic circles, watercolorists were derided as hobbyists, old, Victorian women who daubed at their easels during their seaside holidays. But with his keen eye, innate skill and solid background in oil painting, Bailey eschewed the suggested outlines and muted hues of traditional watercolors in favor of strong lines and bright colors.

Watercolor is wrongly assumed to be more forgiving a discipline than oil painting, but in fact it’s a far harder beast to tame — at least according to Bailey’s high standards. “I preferred making harder edges,” he tells me, “and I like having more control over my subject.” By adapting methods learned in his youth, Bailey won early acclaim for the brightness, delicate transparency and tangibility of his work.

Moving to Brevard in the late ’80s for the sake of his daughters’ education, Bailey found himself drawn to the brilliant greens of tropical foliage. Though he started a series of abstracts, he soon turned his attention to wildlife and the landscapes he saw while fishing and taking photos out on the river. “We had a big blue heron that would always hang out in our backyard in Satellite Beach. He had a broken leg and I’d go out and feed him every day.” That heron became the first of his popular wildlife subjects.

But Bailey’s most impressive paintings are those of the verdure — burnished sea grape leaves, explosive birds of paradise, and almost opalescent ripening mangoes. As our interview comes draws to a close in the studio of his Melbourne Beach home, I notice a current piece nearing completion on his large desk. It’s a bowl of reddish green mangoes in a cut crystal bowl atop a delicately laced tablecloth.

It’s this painting that best captures both the mechanics of his artwork and the spirit of his inspiring life.   I’m stunned by the skill with he rendered the reflections of the fruit against the refracted angles of the bowl. Until then, I’d always thought of painting as an accretive process, adding layer upon layer until a shape comes together. As Bailey explains, it’s more a reductive process.

Rather than laboring over each individual angle and shadow of glass, Bailey paints what’s behind the crystal, and soon the intricate angles of the bowl begin to take shape as if coaxed from the nothingness of the white canvas.

It’s a good way of approaching Bailey’s work in general, or indeed that of any artist. By filling in what’s behind the present moment, the boy and the man coalesce into an intriguing whole.

Peter Bailey is well-known in the local and statewide art circuits. Look for his work at upcoming festivals.    View his works online at www.pcbaileyartstore.com, or call (321) 674-9738 to set up an appointment.