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.

In his artist statement about his current drawing series, "The Erasing," Bailin, 62, writes: "As an artist who witnessed the waning of my father’s personhood through the dissolution of his memory, I wrestled with how to convey the devastating personal and human experience of memory loss without relying on visual clichés." The answer to that question is revealed in the creative process of the artworks of "The Erasing": draw, erase part of the drawing, repeat, repeat, repeat.

— Ellis Widner • Into The Void • 2017

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

The drawings in [this series] are ephemeral and dreamlike, […] and the figures and settings emerge out of Bailin’s marks—marks of abstraction, gesture, texture, and motion—as if surfacing within one’s consciousness out of white noise. […] His works skirt the edge of abstraction...

— Christopher Michno • Exhibition Review • art ltd, 2014

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

…Bailin's anonymous but expressive figures interact directly with the elements, often at some peril to themselves. For all their mystery and even ominous surreality there is an antic spirit to these drawings. In fact, in more than a few of his rough-hewn but detail charcoals Bailin sets up man (and woman) as the fall guy for nature's own slapstick brand of humors.

— Peter Frank, LA Weekly, 12/27/2002-1/2/2003

Bailin's drawings … remain complex and not easily deciphered.…In the end, his works are contemporary: the new context he provides for these psychologically—charged fragments, juxtaposed one against the other, reflects one of the major problems of modern life—the anxieties that arise from the stream of highly-charged emotional situations that arise daily, the desire for the simple life, and the complexity of the questions that arise when one is finally alone.

— Ruth Pasquine • In Search of a Hero • 2004

I moved to New York in the summer of 1976 and I soon came to realize that narrative art in the conceptual 1970s was problematic. It was then inevitable that I turn my painting ideas into solo performance pieces and theater productions. Links to both my performance art and Abreaction Theater below.

— David Bailin, 1/13/2022