Carrie Anne Baade

3/4/2010- 5pm- 6pm
Carrie Anne Baade

On Thursday March 4, 2010, visiting artist Carrie Anne Baade came to the University of Delaware to talk about her work. She is inspired by and enjoys the art from the 1400s to 1800s. Baade said that when she was young her parents had a book of all the art in the Louvre, that which, she loved to look through. She quotes this book as being the source for her interest in the master artists and figurative painting. However, she attributes her ‘displaced contemporary sense of time’ also on her deep appreciation of historical art. Though she was admitted into the School of the Art Institute of Chicago at age 15, she was met with much opposition. This was because at the time most painters were working in a more abstract vein.
Before graduate school at the University of Delaware, Carrie talked about how she held various jobs and traveled. One of the main reasons she traveled was because she felt guilty about not paying attention during her survey art history class. This was the catalyst for her trek across the world visiting every piece of art and architecture she would have encountered in the survey class. Besides traveling she held jobs at venues such as Sam’s Club and continued to create her own as well as commissioned work on the side. Carrie mentioned how she was surprised about how certain commissions would end up “compromising what you are doing”. In a way she thought she would never contribute to kitsch, however in the end she did. It was around this time that she decided to go on to graduate school.
During her time at the University of Delaware, she was still being met with conflict in regards to her figurative work. Nevertheless, she continued to work in a realist style. She even began to take Hilton Browns color mixing classes, learning more in depth on how to work in egg tempera and oil color mixing. She loved how the materials would predict how the work would end up looking like.
On her quest to figure out her own style and language in painting, Carrie talked about how she had to return to where she began. That was the refrigerator door, the place where she had her first art exhibition. On her refrigerator she had these magnets, which were given to her by a friend. These consisted of fragmented imagery through out art history. She began to play with these magnets and move them around her refrigerator placing them on top of other photographs. She liked how this looked and decided that she would go through art history and cut out fragments from various paintings and use them to create a collage. Her process begins with obtaining multitudes of imagery form preexisting paintings, and then classifying them and placing them into files, for example “Madonna with childs” and “ugly baby Jesuses“. She would then go through these files and take images to create collages. These collages served as the source image from which she would paint. Her paintings were done in an extremely realist manner employing trompe l’oeil so that the collaged elements would look as though they were actually collaged onto the canvas. She loved this effect because not only was she taking quotes from art history but also she was using her self as the main figure to create a sort of biographical story. She enjoys imagination and dream paintings and was extremely excited, post graduation to find herself amongst a community of artists creating in a similar vein.