Bailin Studio

I dislike crowds. They make me uncomfortable. Especially groups of people congregating around a single idea or ideology. They are the Cossacks that terrorized my ancestors and who terrorize us now. This series shows only the gathering. What threatens them is rarely real but it is they who haunt my dreams.

— David Bailin • 2022

After several years working on the large-scale Erasing Series, I'm drawing small. The poem, The Fire Cycle, by Zachary Schomburg from his book Scary, No Scary, published by Black Ocean Press, 2009, inspired me with so many visual ideas of solicitude and sublime immolation that I couldn't resist exploring his brilliant vision.

From his early Holocaust drawings,[…] to his series of Biblical scenes set in the midcentury, to today's erasings, works that reference the loss of memory and personality, Bailin's narratives offer us a way to think about the human condition. We can be cruel, we can be banal, and eventually we aren't anymore.

— Leslie Newell Peacock • Bailin. Criswell. Peters • 2015

Bailin … presents incidents that mark a transition in ordinary lives–the ordinary lives of what seem to age minor captains of industry or their mid-level subordinates–to something outside the ordinary. Drawn in charcoal (and coffee!) on large sheets of paper, Bailin’s rough-hewn but beautifully detailed pictures present us with men in crisis–that is, men who seem to have grasped that their crises have overcome them and require resistance or escape.

— Peter Frank • Haiku Reviews • Huffipost.com, 2012

The Archive surveys the 30 years of my early artistic development from performance art to large scale narrative drawings. While the formats change there remains a core theme that continues in my most current work.