Jon Beinart – "What inspires you to create art Carrie?"

Carrie Ann Baade – "What inspires me: Making the metaphor real! Finding that ineffable hidden mysterious thing about how I tick or humans are wired and then finding a way to put it in a form. Finding a way to speak about my feelings and beliefs and then finding an old vessels or idea…a myth or an entity that can be dusted off and resurrected to add weight and meaning to my petty travails. It's about making the unreal real, making it believable for someone else. Painting the simultaneous contradictions that are present in every day of my existence help me cope. My ideas start with the fanciful and idealized world of the mind.  I have a flash of a vision…I write down a scribble and usually the WHOLE composition is there…is 5 second incomprehensible line drawing that looks like nothing. I really like finding these later on the floor or in a sketchbook and going: YUP! there it was. From there I do a collage.

In the collage, I like the way that each layer is like a doorway to another painting, time, dimension and that it is a way of elaborating into a meta-narrative. Their content has evolved towards parable like stories that deal with morality but my work is also/simultaneously, autobiographical. I like talking. I love communicating, but I love secret languages, paradoxes, mysteriousness, and lies. I will do a thing. Many life-changing things, just because it is ironic or nonsensical…and makes me laugh and this is definitely in my paintings.  I think my work will continue to be an investigation of the struggle between inside verses outside, virtue verses vice, and man verses monster…. and why people resemble their pets or other animals and some animals are human…. which is why I am going to marry my cat. It's a girl cat, so I guess it's a pussy thing. (please laugh). She is the counter point of my soul embodied in a fat, orange furry creature….and she isn't even evil. I think she is the great love of my life…. I will be back in a second: I have to go pet her again.

Other things that inspire me: The hard worked day…and the well lived life, the feeling of running up hill, precocious children, intimate conversations with strangers about god and the meaning of life, paying attention to how time can speed up and slow down for seemingly no reason…. and then trying to impose my will on it to manipulate it's rhythm…. biographies of humans great and greater: how they survived and exalted the bizarre opportunity that is life. Saying FUCK YOU to adversity and THANK GOD for the rest. Trying to pay attention to the things that make life worth living and living a life that is extraordinary at the same time. Think about it: what are your life goals? How do you achieve them? It's a daily toil of sacrifices. Now, if you were to think of the ten best things about being human…you know the list: sex and the taste of chocolate, the color of the sun through leaves, and memory of your mother holding you in the middle of the night after a bad dream…. or something similar…these have nothing in common with the list of how you achieve your life goals. It is making the painful sacrifices and living the beautiful small, intimate sensual life at the same time that is the balancing act…. while dodging debt, danger, and death.
I love this ride."

Jon Beinart – "I can definitely see you as a cat lover Carrie. I am also in love with my cats. They make perfect muses and I believe the Egyptians were on the right track by deifying them. You explained a lot about your motivation, inspiration and process in your response to my first question. I have asked you the following question before (in a personal email). Why do you mask many of your subjects (who I believe are often reflections of yourself) with a magnified set of eyes? (Sorry if you're sick of answering this question. I'm sure you have been asked countless times)."

Carrie Ann Baade – "My first experience with altered identity occurred when I was about three. My mother, while being quite beautiful, is not photogenic so she would take it upon herself to edit photos. I recall her sitting down with the scissors and cutting herself out. In one in particular, I am holding on to her leg…and then I was holding on to no one. It was extraordinary to see the altered record, the removal, the changing of history and memory….. cutting out takes things away, but pasting them puts them back in.

When I was eighteen, I had a friend start a tattoo. I gave him my back and told him to do what he wanted. He began to draw Giger's Li, a postmortem portrait of his wife who died close to the time I was born. This to me is clearly a medusa image. From that time on, I became Medusa or rather she is my alter ego. I can read my self-portraits as each having specific symbolism leading to her or the language of attributes that I have cultivated out of my dialogue with this myth. Medusa turned her victims to stone with her stare. I have personified medusa as the ability to have power, possibly negative power. I think each of us has the potential to be a monster…. but each of us has free will. We each make the decisions that determine one's actions; I make the decision to be good or evil, positive or negative. I was embarrassed and mortified at one time that I could be evil, do evil things, suffer the repercussions of making horrible decisions. So in this way my eyes masks serve as a large prophylactic, thus protecting the viewer from my gaze. I have always been sensitive. Wearing sunglasses was one way that I could perform life with a mask. I could be around people but not let them see my eyes. The eyes are so powerful, they take the outside world in and they expose the interior world of the individual to the outside. Being vulnerable was a challenge for many years. I have spent a good deal of time watching people. I notice that few are who they are all the time…I included. One is different with people they know, or do not know, their wife, daughter, teacher, dog, a man in the parking lot…. each person changes with interactions. We wear behavior masks. I like the idea that there are many people within each of us…and few know them all. We are each a gestalt of identities. It is such a revelation to see that there was a way I could attempt to show this metaphor by layering the eyes. While working with eyes masks, I realized that I kept going back to our lady and our man of sorrow…. a type of painting created in the early Northern Renaissance of the Madonna and Christ, crying. I found great comfort in these eyes crying. I love their spermozic tears that fall like jewels or pearls. There is sorrow in my life. I believe there is an undercurrent of sorrow in our existence that is ever present and inescapable. I liked the idea of using these eyes as a way of taking the grief out of my own eyes and placing it with those who most appropriately personified it…. for me rather than being self indulgent, this felt more like a universal sorrow.

My mother asked me to quit painting crying people… I have been painting crying people for 13 years. So, I started painting people without eyes. I realized that love is blind and so is rage. So I painted those themes a bit. I like the rule of eye masks…to use it and use it well is to be original and have a style, to do it to excess or poorly is to become a cliché and suffer being trite. I do enjoy that these eyes instigate an investigation…they suggest a puzzle or a reason why that should be discovered. The viewer cannot know and I have been told they are at times frustrated. I like that there is something that cannot be answered or revealed. So much of life’s secrets are not revealed which is what makes it mysterious.

Lastly, the proportions of big eyed people have pervaded the pop surrealist movement, I like seeing how large I a set of eyes I can set on ones face and still have it hold together…pushing the envelope of how distorted someone can be before they loose their face…. but I also love Picasso and cubism and how disjointed a face can be but our mind will still attempt to read the unity despite the disparity… I don't know the future of the eye masks… I do know that one is on the way: Victims and Predators…. exploring how does and horses appear on people verses tigers and gators. Hope that clears things up?"

Jon Beinart – "Thank You Carrie. That was a very thorough explanation and certainly cleared it up. I promise, I'll never ask again ;) You have already mentioned a few artists who have influenced you. Can you please list a few more and explain what it is that you like about their work."

Carrie Ann Baade – "I love Cara Walker because she courageously explores uncomfortable social issues in a cathartic manner. I love Judith Schaecter for her ability to resurrect the media of stain glass in a fresh and contemporary manner while  being gross and cool at the same time.  Ray Caesar has one of the greatest imaginations of this era. I love his use of pattern and texture. It is his ability to make his characters enticingly glamorous and uniquely disfigured …this polarity creates an attraction-repulsion paradigm results in empathy for his subjects…this is ingenious."

Jon Beinart – "Wow. I hadn't seen Judith Schaecter's work before, or any stained glass imagery in the lowbrow vein for that matter. Very impressive! I know you have had many exhibitions recently. How is your art career going Carrie? Are you able to support yourself with art alone? If not, is this something that you hope to achieve in the near future?"

Carrie Ann Baade – "Currently, I have been invited to show with Billy Shire Fine Art, the MOST important pop surrealist gallery in LA.  This should break the diaphragm of anonymity for me.  You are welcome to read my blog on myspace about making a living as an artist. I should be having a show in Berlin that will travel to London next summer."

Jon Beinart – "Do you think that Pop Surrealism is regarded as an important movement by the Contemporary art world? Have you felt a bias against your art as an artist who affiliates with this movement? Or do you even see yourself as a Pop Surrealist? If not, how would you label your art (if you're not totally opposed to labeling)?"

Carrie Ann Baade – "The Lowbrow/Pop Surrealism movement began as a popular culture movement more than an academic or conceptual art movement.  I am really excited right now because the boundaries are blurring. I see the tides changing and I think this underground movement is taking it's place as a legitimate main stream art movement. My work is well thought out academically but it's cool and edgy so it appeals to those who are interested in pop surrealism. I have been delighted to meet and correspond with the artists in this movement. It's been a challenge for me to consider what I do "Lowbrow" because my work isn't.  I am delighted to have peers and an audience, which my association with the Pop Surrealists has definitely provided me. I am a painter who wants to be affiliated with ideas, invention, and imagination and I see this most strongly in the artists in the Pop Surrealist Movement."

Jon Beinart – "Thank you so much for your time Carrie. Before we wrap up this interview, do you have any exciting news for our readers? Upcoming exhibitions, publications, etc."

Carrie Ann Baade – "Just spent 11 hours installing our show in here in Ningbo…so I am high and bonkers and need a drink and to go to bed. News…just that Billy Shire bought the Passion of Lovers and I am showing with Nicola Verlato at the show in August… I got a job at FSU and I have survived another season and I am still painting. It's all ok if I am still painting. All the VERY best to you.

Carrie

THANK YOU FOR THIS INTERVIEW!"

Carrie Ann Baade's Gallery.

Carrie Ann Baade is one of 50 artists featured in our first book: Metamorphosis. 

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 12th, 2007 at 9:30 pm by Jon Beinart
Categories: Artist Interviews, Exhibitions, Metamorphosis, Paintings.
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