Mike Bayne: Houses, Stripmalls, Fields & Factories

Untitled #7, Oil on Panel, 4 x 6 inches, 2006 © Mike Bayne I’m always struggling to find non-photographic art that interests me. And when I do come across artwork that I find interesting, somehow it always ends up being an artist who, within their medium of choice, is working as close to photography as possible. Mike Bayne is another example of this. Bayne is a painter that makes images that look like 4 x 6 inch photographic prints – even in person and at such a small scale, the carefully applied brush strokes are hard to imagine being applied by hand. And I love the quiet scenes he paints. For a recent show of his called Houses, Stripmalls, Fields & Factories, he begins his statement boldy by declaring his work “is not Photorealist.” At first, I was a bit shocked – even his own definition of the term seemed to fit his work (“painters whose work, to varying degrees, closely resembles photographs”) but reading on, I was interested to see what he was getting at:

It would be easier if there was another term, with less baggage and fewer associations that could refer to what I do, and to all the varieties of painting based on photography, without endlessly referring to only one branch of this genre. … Until there is a term that refers to historical photo based painting, contemporary realists and to the US seventies movement, and is still relevant to art today, I suppose we will continue to use photorealism in a broad, generalist kind of way. This doesn’t, of course, make synthesizing all these ideas visually, in light our linguistic lack of creativity, any easier.