“Which is energetic and impatient,” he laughs in self-assessment. “It can be the case that, while knowing I may never return to whichever place I’m visiting, I’ll only have a window of 10 minutes to myself in the one day I’m there. But that’s still time enough to soak up a little culture and get down on paper what I see and my feelings about it. It’s about capturing moments that would otherwise be lost.” The result often grows into a personal mini-guide to whichever town or city he’s in, with drawings and companion text later posted by Baynes on Moleskine’s website or as part of his own My Space blog. “The internet has been a welcome prompt to my pushing ahead with the art,” he says. “It’s a great way of making your work accessible and of allowing it a life of its own.”
Not that he’s always been so high-tech. Growing up in what he calls ‘the badlands of Essex” (specifically a small village off the A12, 60 miles from London), he was first encouraged to express himself with crayons bought for him by his parternal grandmother. Boarding school later provided some degree of art education. Visits to The Minories, the one gallery in nearby Colchester, helped a little too. But most of Baynes’s awareness of his favourite subject was self-acquired (there was an unsurprising teenage fondness for the French Impressionists, for Toulouse Lautrec and Van Gogh) and his developing skills self-generated. Nor was art school a viable option for him. “Putting me through school had been expensive and there was an expectation I’d go out and get a job,” he notes.
Travelling the highways and byways as a sales rep for an agricultural seed company was perhaps not the career path he had envisaged for himself, but still he was able to draw a parallel with the lives of his favourite painters. “All of them, the unstable ones included, had huge work ethics,” Baynes smiles. “It’s all about tenacity. Whatever creativity you are born with isn’t enough in itself. You’ve really got to work hard too.” And after doing so for three years he discovered that it was then possible to get an independent grant for tertiary education. “But they then said that I was too old at 21 to go on a fine art course and suggested I’d make myself much more employable if I did graphic design instead. And so I did, working part-time in a local ad agency for money and experience.”
That in turn led to the chance to join a London agency, which in turn marked the real start to what has been a high-level and distinguished career in media and advertising. “Did that basic grounding in graphics inform my art?” he wonders aloud now. “You know, I’m really failing to distinguish a boundary between my work and my art these days. Obviously, I work in a very creative sector and increasingly the lines separating my professional and artistic lives are blurred.” That said, the various demands of professional life meant a lengthy hiatus from 1970 through to the mid ‘80s when Baynes had no free time at all in which to develop his art. Meeting his wife Sian proved a turning point. “She encouraged me to pick it up again and there’s been no looking back since then,” he says.
By which and for starters he means the 30,000-plus drawings he’s executed in the interim. “That’s been an ongoing thing. for 20 years now and just happens instinctively at this point. I don’t even have to think about it. The painting then emerged from that. And more recently, and following on from part-time courses I’ve done at The Slade (which is the art school to die for) and St. Martin’s, I’ve gone off in other directions too. All elements of the work are represented here on the website, of course. You’ve got the quite formally executed, Hugh Casson-influenced watercolours, heavily reliant as they are on pen-and-ink, and then the much more spontaneous sketching, which I think of as best representing my current voice. I’m really proud of all of it though, however schizophrenic it may sound.”
Today, Baynes likens the structure of his life to that of a three-legged stool. “The first leg is my work, the second my family (he and Sian have daughters aged 17 and 14) and the third my art. Without any one of those components, it’s going to go toppling over. Everyone around me knows and appreciates that, and is very supportive of what I do.” He admits that the various other demands on his time take their toll on his art: “It’s always been a bit stop-start because of the job and for a long while that hindered me from developing my own voice. But while I still haven’t achieved my ideal of being to sketch or paint every single day, I’m at a point much closer to it these days. Art is an integral part of who I am and always will be.” And asked where he’d like to take that art, should circumstance allow, he replies instantaneously, “To infinity and beyond. There’s no stopping it now.”
Alan Jackson
London