The disease forced him to turn from his signature super-realist style to a looser, more gestural technique, as in his Matchbook Covers and his recent landscapes, which verge on total abstraction. In 2018 Baeder was diagnosed, as so many of my artist friends have been over the past two decades, with macular degeneration, an eye condition that continually weakens the vision. We stayed in touch, through the ups and downs of his artistic genre, his change in focus to other realms of popular culture, and his expanded mediums. An illustrated side project by Jenelle Carter Phillumenation Shop Select Page. Then he up and moved lock, stock and luncheonette down to Nashville, TN. An ongoing illustrated side project by Jenelle Carter featuring matchbook covers from her personal collection of matchbooks. We worked together on a dummy for his book that became Gas Food & Lodging(Abbeville) he introduced me to his book agent and friend, who became my book agent and friend we hung out and were excited by many of the same things. I only knew he was from the Midwest because he’d slip into a lilting twang from time to time. He was born in South Bend, IN, but he was such a New Yorker. He had come to New York to be an advertising art director from Atlanta, where he studied at the High Museum. The smell of linseed oil and cola syrup filled the room. On the walls were more diners-paintings and photos or paintings that looked like photos. The rest of the flat was filled with gems of vernacular, the inspiration for many drawings and prints. All that was missing was a soda jerk who looked like Andy Hardy. He had what amounted to a full-scale vintage soda fountain in his living room-chrome cabinetry, swivel seats, the works. This was the era of photorealism, and while I’d been impressed by the skill of many artists, I was in awe of Baeder’s passionate precision. Hanging in OK Harris in SoHo were large photorealistic canvases of the very diners I was dreaming of. Around 40 years ago, I was admiring those quintessential American roadside eateries, thinking what a great book could be made of such uniformly customized ephemeral structures, when I saw paintings that made me drool. Comprising five decades of work from 1972–2018, the show includes some of the most famous diner paintings from the artist’s personal collection, his final series of Matchbook Cover paintings and his luminous still-life photographs.įor me, Baeder was a match made in dinerland. See: the items marked as 7 and 8 in the reference image below.“John Baeder: Looking Back” is the artist’s first exhibition at ACA Galleries in New York, and the first all-encompassing intro- and retrospective in a while. One was used as an overlay on the lightbulb to help create the feel of a glow and shadow, the other used to mimic landscape. There are some paths created with RetroGrain strokes that have been used without any clipping mask being applied to them.
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