Recent Interview

Carrie Ann Baade

Please tell me all about your history life as an artist:

My beginning started in New Orleans which is a magic place to be a child.  In this city music and food are alive but so are the gardens and buildings populated with colourful characters from so many races and creeds alive and dead. Then we moved to the arid, mountainous region of Colorado where there were no children and only the excitement of bones from dead horses, rocks, and branches to play with.   Trying to make a barren world something delightful, developed my need to make believe and invent. One of my favourite games was that an evil demon that lived in trees around my home and at school and ate birds and lost children and I would gather an army to destroy it. When children did chance to come over, I would put on performances that I was possessed by ghosts of Indians or I would contact their dead relatives by séance.  While I have drawn and painted since I was a conscious, as I got older literature influenced me.  It turned out that if the first books that really engaged me where Dune, Edgar Allen Poe, and Interview with a Vampire, so of course it is no surprise that I was a Goth from a young age.  I spent high school dancing at a small bar to Joy Division and Christian Death with the rare opportunity to see Skinny Puppy or Einsterzende Naubauten live. While I preferred the dark and imaginative artists from the past such as Dali, Bosch, Fuseli, and Gustave Moreau, it has been travelling the world and its many museums that have tempered my tastes with the knowledge and interest of all art's history.  When I was 21, I happened into classical realism school at a small atelier in Florence, Italy and learned the techniques of verism but it was a real nightmare for me because this training is akin to brain washing having only the reality of the natural world and no development of how to create from the imagination.  It was not until I entered grad school, that I came upon this manner of creating my work from a collage then using the collage to paint from that I really started to find all my interests including: fairy tales, psychology, historic rulers, myths, and religion; and the ability to put it all into my work at the same time.    

How do you picture yourself in the future? What are your greatest desires?

Next year I have a big show in Berlin at Strychnin Gallery and there are plans for this show to travel to Belgium and London. I hope to start to experience a little recognition also with the publication of Jon Bienart's METAMORPHISIS which features my work along side the great contemporary surrealists Alex Grey and Ernst Fuchs.  I hope the ground work is established that I might have the privilege to continue to paint and to be exhibited.  It took me 15 years to really get my technique and develop my mind so that I had something to say with my work.  Now it is just finding the time and money to continue. I thought being a starving artist was a cliché, but this starving doesn't happen until you really have your work figured out and then with great tenacity, there is a deliberate decision to not do anything else but create and promote the work with the prayer that the world will catch you from failing and lift you up from obscurity.  For now, I have so much work to do right now in the present, I can't imagine very far into the future.

How do you look upon today's art?

I have never been so happy to be alive. I thought that all the artists that I would ever love were dead in the ground but only this year I have found SO many artists that I love! Kris Kuksi and Naoto Hattori, Elizabeth McGrath, Ray Caesar, and Chris Mars all make me so ecstatically happy! However, today my heroine is Cara Walker. She is the most courageous artist working today.
Do you plan publishing your works in a book? Have you received any proposals for it? I would love the opportunity to publish book that features this first 5 years of my work, alas I bet I am a couple years off from having a deal secured. Recently I was nominated for a United States Artist Award which would give me so many opportunities and then I could do it myself.

You have a mix of influences like a 14th and 18th centuries of history painting until our days with an esoteric and history that almost reminds a mixture with symbolic and surrealist art. Can you explain what the essence of your work is?

As an artist and subject in my work, I consider myself to be steward and ax man to the legacy of art history by cutting and serving up the reinvigorated past to be contemplated in context of the contemporary.
Each one of the layers in my work acts like a door to a past time or reference to an old story. Through showing these, layers it is my intention to weave what are called metanarratives, these are telling a story through a story which ends up having both denotative and connotive meanings...therefore I can refer to everything a past story might represent, such as in "The Red Queen," denotes the biblical Judith and Holofernes as well as Salome and John the Baptist, and also Alice and Wonderland but for myself I was exploring what it is to be a powerful woman with sexual allure and the consequences of one's actions. If killing the object of your regard, real or metaphor, is the consequence, was it worth the price of one's consience being constantly haunted by one's evil deeds?

What is the message behind it? Depending on the work…they each have their own story:

In general, I am a big believer in not forgetting the lessons of the past. These are the foundation for our morality. I want to make accessible the best of our world's heroines and goddess, rulers and monsters for current time.
For example, The Teachings of Lilith is based on the writings of Elaine Pagels and how the snake in Eden is not an EVIL but a symbol for the fall mankind's move a way from blissful ignorance.  According to Pagels this snake is the instigator for Eve to provide the fruit of the tree of knowledge which gave us free will.  I like to think of my work being a school for more instigators of awareness.
Many of my works are cautionary tales to women to fall in love at the peril or conflict of their mind.
The Ecstasy Of Madam Dolorosa, is influenced by Picasso's Crying Woman and the Catholic Madonna's called Our Lady of Sorrow, and Ecstasy of Saint Theresa who was a saint who described her rapturous episodes of experiencing god in a sexual way while, I am comparing the act of being in love to be it's own possessive god that is as horrible as it may be pleasurable.
From the descriptions of St. Theresa's experiences:
The "devotion of ecstasy or rapture", a passive state, in which the consciousness of being in the body disappears (II Cor. xii. 2-3). Sense activity ceases; memory and imagination are also absorbed in God or intoxicated. Body and spirit are in the throes of a sweet, happy pain, alternating between a fearful fiery glow, a complete impotence and unconsciousness, and a spell of strangulation, intermitted sometimes by such an ecstatic flight that the body is literally lifted into space. This after half an hour is followed by a reactionary relaxation of a few hours in a swoon-like weakness, attended by a negation of all the faculties in the union with God. From this the subject awakens in tears; it is the climax of mystical experience, productive of the trance.
"We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain." Alan Watts

Can you tell us who your biggest influences are?

Vermeer, Holbein, and the primitive Northern Renaissance painters in addition to Terry Gilliam.

I can only speak for the present on these but today these are my honest influences..

If you were:

A Book: Anna Karenina…I had a mad affair and I while I know how the book ends…I am afraid I am living its parallel existence sometimes as Anna and sometimes as Vronsky. I am terribly afraid this situation can not end well because I read ahead. It has been so bizarre to realize my life is such a cliché, it feels so authentic when it is happening but I rely on this universal principal in my work.

A Language:

Mad Girl's Love Song by Sylvia Plath

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

My favourite short story: "The Yellow Wall Paper," by Charlotte Perkins…which affirms to me that some of us should remain unmarried after trying it.

Music: Shining Road by the Cranes

A Country, a city, a time: Paris at the end of the 19th century…I can't help it! I love Oscar Wilde, Odillion Redon, Baudelaire, and Absinthe….Art Noveau and all the Symbolists and Post Impressionists.  

A Painting: Starry Night by Van Gogh because I always cry in front of this painting….For me this was the one perfect painting after years of struggle and then it all ended.  


Non non: Thank you! THANK YOU!!!