Gatherings

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

Statement

For years the characters inhabiting my drawings persevered no matter how absurd that perseverance was – a hapless but heroic Buster Keaton inhabiting a Kafkaesque world. The drawings focused on that figure as he (it was always he) did battle with some crisis of minutia or conundrum.

But this self-contained and claustrophobic world began to feel too comfortable in a time of plague and politics. The anger, frustration and fear that seemed so removed from the earlier work took over. At first, it was a single running figure, camouflaged within a pointillist landscape that eventually morphed into the crowd of frenetic men searching for, lashing out against, or threatened by something unseen or unstated that may lay hidden nearby.

With the Gatherings series, my attention turns to the crowd. As with any fomented group, what threatens them is rarely real, but, unfortunately, it is they who will haunt our dreams.

View Gatherings Catalog
Purchase Catalog

Return to Portfolios