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02/22/2006: "Balancing Act, An Artistic Journey" by Hyacinthe Baron
In a short story by Genet the audience gasps as it watches the tightrope walker balance high up on a rope. Anticipation stirs the adrenaline as the expectation grows on the viewer that a fall could be imminent.
Artists are tightrope walkers too, performing the most precarious balancing acts between reality and fantasy.
A solution is needed for many problems artist's face in regard to integrity of their art and the need to have money. It is a subject dear to my heart.
So we all must balance our lives in order to have what we desire and not fall. Working in order to make money is psychologically draining if it involves things that are not really of interest to us. We become bored and that is tiring, so we turn, like Walter Mitty, to imagining our dreams come true.
That was the case when I worked for a NYC chain of Department stores. Luckily I had my own office so I could close the door and sketch as I talked on the phone. My best friend Joe, who was Gay, would come in at the end of the day and collect my drawings, frame them and put them on a wall in his apartment.
In the meantime I had also started painting and showing in the Greenwich Village Outdoor Art Exhibit, and selling directly, and a dealer had found me who was buying every painting of women and mother's and children I could paint. He put them in expensive frames and resold them to Galleries and high end furniture and department stores where they resold for big prizes. It was a dream come true for me, to become an artist and to make a living.
Now there was a demand being created for my paintings of certain subjects and it was becoming a bit boring, so I began to experiment to see how far I could stretch the genre.
Then I was commissioned to make quite a few lithographic limited signed editions on these themes.
Boyhood, and Two Motherhood Lithograph, limited editions by Hyacinthe Baron, I was avante garde in my choice of following Michelangelo's lead and using male models for my female images and making them appear androgynous.
Today, almost 50 years later, photographers for Vogue and Vanity Fair have discovered my early work and have their women's hair blowing in an imaginary wind and deeply shadowed with an imaginary light coming from the left or the right. The hair of course was a device to imply movement.
Thus satisfied, or so I thought, I continued to find new compositional possibilities and to explore them and color combinations, all within the parameters of the market demand. And the paintings continued to sell.
But I was beset with small inner voices urging me to use my considerable drafting and painting skills to render deeper images dragged up from my inner psyche and innate abilities.
I had my own gallery on Madison Avenue so I was wearing two hats, artist on display and gallery hostess available to future clients and visits from my collectors. I couldn't imagine I would feel frustrated. I had fulfilled my dream and was living it daily. But my artistic spirit longed for a different kind of journey, one which would take me out of the city to far away exotic places where great and grand inspiration would overcome me and I would find the tools I needed to render monumental creations.
Would this taking be in the form of taking a 'evacation'? I have never been any good at being limited by time, or enjoying myself because I have to, or responding on Thursday because I have to go back on Friday. Every Vacation we ever took extended from three weeks to three months.
No, this time I would have to leave everything behind to pursue the opportunity to create my greatest works. Why? Is it true that artist's are the biggest masochists? What guarantee did I have of success? I must have been out of my mind.
I left the city of New York and ended up in the desert of Arizona where suddenly Indian images started to haunt me. I had never even considered Indians of any sort before. And then one day at a gallery opening of my latest works, I met White Bear, a Hopi Spiritual leader. We stood in front of a 4foot x 4foot canvas I had done of a young Indian standing on a ledge casting feathers to the winds as off to the left a huge face of an old white haired Indian man occupied half the canvas.
White Bear by Hyacinthe Baron, oil on canvas, 4 x 4The old man now stood before me in the form of White Bear whom I had just met and had never seen before. There was, in the moment of recognition of something beyond understanding, a shared sense that inspiration is a rare gift and by all means one must find a way to follow its dictates.
And so a series of sculptures and myths followed, all inspired by Indian spirits if you will, and then, something else, something outside of this world and totally science fiction. (And not just because White Bear and his wife invited us up to the Hopi Mesa to watch the space ships land.)
Geronimo and the Finger of God in the Superstition Mountains by Hyacinthe Baron 
White Bear's Daughter by Hyacinthe Baron But how to balance the need to make a living with the time and effort required to follow this muse? And how to make certain that what I was doing was not the result of some temporary madness and that it would, in the future, for art collectors, prove to have been worth the time taken from some more gainful employment of my crafts?
So at the same time I began selling hand painted silk pillows and silk clothing in local stores and to create the 7 large plaster sculptures that comprised the grouping of the Myth of the "Impossible Love" The Legend of White Painted Woman.(The virtual exhibit will be available in March on http://www.barongallery.com)
One day a private plane landed in the desert outside the Frank Lloyd Wright House we were living in near Taliesen West in Scottsdale. Flown by a Catholic Priest from a Diocese in Canada, he had heard of the sculptures and came to see and buy and thought the Madonna and Child a most religious piece. (The child in my larger than life sculpture, according to the myth, had cloven hooves instead of feet.)
The pillows ended up in Macy’s and other major stores all over the world and I had to hire young women to help me paint them and to model for me as well.
Again I had to balance my art and my living and now we moved to San Francisco to open a showroom to sell the pillows, and a factory to paint them.
Again inspiration struck. I was beset with color photographs in my mind of ancient Egyptians bearing draperies and big headdresses, only they were light brown and glossy, as if they were embedded in ice.
So I found a studio and gallery in Stinson Beach, a huge nursery on the main street, and began to sculpt the small clay figures and larger than life, clay, plaster, fiberglass monumental sculptures that became the stars of the short film "In Search of Ancient Spirits" produced by Ed Baron and narrated with my poetry. I began to make the sculptures in a studio open to the public and often with naked models, and when they were done a journalist from the Pulitzer Prize winning Coastline Newspaper ran a feature article: The headline read: THE ATLANTEAN REEMERGENCE.
Indeed the Sculptures standing around the gallery in the moonlight, with the ocean roaring in the background, took on an eerie essence, Nereids dancing naked covered in seaweed and fiberglass draperies.
The Ice Priest of the Lotus, by Hyacinthe Baron, clay, oxides, resins, fiberglass with plaster casting. 8ft highAnd so the carefully tended balancing act continues as each journey is completed and new ones begin.
As artists continue to contemplate what they are about, what their own works signify, whether they are living up to their potential, how to deal with their frustrations and so on it seems that more questions arise.
Does an artist know what they are doing? Or what is inspiring them? And of what nature is the obsession, even the compulsion to make art?
I believe visual artists in particular live in a "Mirror World", one that is a reflection of their inner feelings and their outer observations, tainted by "inspiration" and colored by imagination. When effectively rendered a harmony is created that extends outward and reaches for unexpected choices and contacts.
I believe in recording artistic adventures and works, as in books, in order to pique the interest of art lovers and collectors and to leave a lasting impression embedded in the minds of readers, and inspiring others imaginations through images and word descriptions. In this way it is like inviting a viewer to accompany us on the journey, where the fractured elements are in pieces and entice the interest until the end when the complete picture finally appears.
Balancing one's life so as to live well and make art is important to me. Imagination is the root of inspiration and gives the courage to pursue fulfillment. One inspiration seems to inspire another when action is taken.
Sometimes I feel like Scheherezade: only the tales will keep my artistic spirit alive as I enter the twilight of my career and continue to pursue my fancies.
Recently it occurred to me that there might be more than meets the eye at the Baron Conservancy in Wonder Valley where the big sky and endless desert are inspiring Earthscape visions for my next series of etchings and paintings.
I imagine that the archeological treasures we have been unearthing since the recent rains coursed down the network of washes are only the tip of discoveries yet to come.
For instance, there appears to be a segment of a construct of some kind of stone jutting out of the sands under a Smoke Tree. There is a small symbol of a maze stamped on an outer edge. (This is curious as the same maze symbol is featured in my Cassandra's Tear Trilogy of books written way before we acquired this land.)
Rumors among the locals abound about a great sculptural work in the area created during the gold rush days by an itinerant artist more than 100 years ago. He was a traveler from a foreign land who claimed to have fled certain prejudices against artists in his native Roumania at the time he left to seek refuge here, where he could balance his visions and create and fulfill them.
We are excited trying to imagine what could be buried here and knowing it could be as deeply embedded as our wild imagination will allow.
We'll keep you posted as more of this comes to light and we discover more artifacts. I can feel images starting to form. Now that I no longer have to do my balancing act, I hope my imaginative adventures continue and will inspire you.
We would like you share some of our adventures as we traveled coast to coast on the "ride of a lifetime"(Only 98% is ever true, the rest is pure imagination, and talk about a balancing act!)
To read about Hyacinthe and Ed Baron's artistic journeys as the Art Mystery Lavender in Laguna, Hooker's Green in New York, Burnt Sienna in Scottsdale, go to http:www.Amazon.com. books, author:Hyacinthe Baron. You can read and look inside the book at Click the "Search Inside" button.
Visit http://www.barongallery.com and my absolutearts.com Premiere Portfolio: Baron, Hyacinthe
