In conversation with Dan Baldwin

Dan is at his studio, connected to his home in West Sussex. The space has the comfortable chaos of a working artist: stacked canvases line the walls, tables are crowded with paints and knick-knacks, and a drum kit sits in the corner. Behind Dan, to his right, is a painted Jaguar E-type bonnet. To his left, a painted vase. He explains that both are commissions he has been working on, and both have been unmistakably Baldwinised.

I ask my first question..

What began or prompted your connection with these psychological landscapes, do you see them in your mind before you begin painting?

Dan adjusts his sleeves and begins…

It goes back to when I first started making art and I was working with what I had around me. I had seen the works of Peter Blake and before him Joseph Cornell and inspired by them I began using found objects. I would find an old Bible, a target, an iconographical image and I would put them together with elements from childhood to create mixed media pieces, these were my very first artworks when I was still at college back in ‘92. Then I’d find things like a nice piece of wood or a cat skull, and I’d assemble them into my collages. Seeing Blake and Cornell’s work gave clarity to the fact that I didn’t have to be very good at drawing, I could make art in other ways.

As my pieces developed, there was a lightning bolt moment around 2004, where I started to fragment the compositions. I began painting very kitsch animals which were oversized. A big 6’ foot kitten or a huge squirrel that was towering and looking down over you. There was something interesting in the juxtaposition between the innocent squirrel, or the puppy or kitten, and the fact it was huge and it had a real presence to it. Then I was doing these forest paintings that were beautiful but sinister. There's something beautiful about being in a forest but it's also creepy, you think of death and decay. I love that contrast between the innocent and the sinister. Then I started to fragment my pieces further, so you’d have a kitten, a rib-cage, a flower, a bone, these various elements coming together to create something multi-layered.

The reason I call these fragmented landscapes is because when I'm walking, I see a tree branch, or a bird of prey above me, a robin then a crisp packet, a McDonalds wrapper in the hedgerow with a hedgehog. You don't see the landscape in one go, you see it in fragments. A muddy puddle and a blossom appearing, you absorb snippets. This approach worked well with how I painted already, in different layers.

I’ve read that your work is often inspired by your own reflections on the bigger questions of life, loss and human existence. How does this play into your recurring motifs as well as your bold colours? How does the imagery in your work speak to their meaning?

I discovered Vanitas paintings from the 15th century in my early painting days. The genre is all about mortality, you get images of flowers, fruit, skulls, jewels. The message is that we will all die and you can’t take worldly things with you. I see my work as a kind of contemporary Vanitas, but with a very Pop, bright approach.

In my earlier work I began putting life and death together, then innocence and decay, nature and man, science and religion. It resulted in kaleidoscopic compositions where you’d see these tensions and contrasts. For this collection I’ve lost a lot of the darker themes from previous works, this is more about nature and colour and how that has been my healing through difficult times. I still include some darker elements like bones, or a barbed wire fence, but it has become much more refined. I’m less interested in life and death, I’ve tried to simplify my compositions and the work has developed with me as I’ve changed.

Now, I'm 53, and I've been painting for 35 years. I'm trying to find perfection in every piece, to really refine my work and be conscious of every element. If something isn’t right I paint over it. Having lived in West Sussex for 17 years, when I see the change in nature, that is what really interests me now. Walking along, seeing a robin on a barbed wire fence, that to me is symbolic, it’s beauty, innocence and man. Nature busily doing its thing.

Whilst you are leaving out the darker elements now, do you still find you are interested in the tension and contradiction between things? Has your artistic process remained the same?

I am very much still interested in tensions. It's that tension which gives the works their edge and content. But it’s a raindrop, a squiggle, rather than a gun or a chainsaw. I can say a lot without having to spell it out. The bird or the rabbit, they are symbolic of us, we are just trying to survive. There’s a fragility to life and I love using innocent elements, but I am using them metaphorically as a way of talking about man. I don’t want to paint human figures anymore, so I use the symbolism of nature, the poppy or the swallow. I've become more selective.

Then comes my love of colour. I start with colour without knowing the composition. Then I start to build the composition in layers. I may begin with a feeling I'm after but I don't know the composition before I make it.

I have backwards and forwards paintings. The backwards paintings I start with loose, purely abstract colours; pinks, oranges, lime greens, I'm very drawn to candy tones. Then I bring in the composition maybe in just a black or white line and keep layering over this so that colours and elements come through the piece. That is why it’s backwards, because the loose first layer comes through the second layer. Other paintings in this collection are forward paintings, where I work on top of the background colour with clean elements. For me the process of painting grows spontaneously, it's like a puzzle, or writing a piece of music. You never know where it's going until it's done, but you know when it’s not quite there. Some pieces take years, other pieces take days, it all depends.

Do your imagined landscapes ever take inspiration from real landscapes or spaces you like or have seen? How much of the work includes blends of dreams with memory?

The majority of the works are based on real elements; real flowers, real fences, real birds, but I'm not painting them in a real way. I tend to take a lot of photographs if I see a lovely silhouette of a tree branch or a barbed wire fence. I’m influenced by my walks in nature on the South downs or in Cornwall, but I'm not painting real life. The works are Influenced by reality but ultimately, imagined.

There is a percentage of each composition that is to do with childhood, nostalgia and innocence.

Dan strokes his chin and thinks for a minute.

I’m often thinking back to childhood. I was almost abducted when I was about 8.

This throws me and I ask for more detail.

Oh It was after school, all the parents had left and I was on my own waiting. There was a man leaning against a car, and I’ll never forget he had a hat on, sunglasses, and a long mac, like a 1970s detective. He said, ‘your mother can’t come to collect you today, she’s asked me to get you’. I remember as a boy feeling something was wrong, and running back into the school to wait. So, quite often in my work I am thinking about nostalgia, dreams and memory, to do with these moments or my father and mother, their separation, all of these things are in the back of my mind as I paint.

But my predominant focus is nature and colour. I take my surroundings in like a sponge, the clouds, the tree silhouettes, a deer, but I'm not representing the literal.

Who have been your most informative artistic influences? What drew you to their work and how did this translate into yours?

Early in my career I got really into Hockney, I used to take my easel up the south downs and paint. I love his use of colour, how he's always developing and looking to nature. He's got a very distinctive way of portraying the landscape with a great energy to it.

When I say I make landscapes, people ask me if I use watercolour or oil. I explain they aren’t landscapes in a traditional sense, they’re more influenced by Warhol or Rauschenberg or Basquiat or Hockney.

As I mentioned earlier, I loved Joseph Cornell's work because he would find real elements in New York and put them in cabinets to create a kind of collage. When I saw Rauschenberg it really resonated with me as he was using a lot of printmaking and I loved the idea of silk screening onto canvas. I think Warhol has also been a major influence because he trained in a more commercial way, which is the same with me. I did communication media, graphic design and printmaking. I didn't train as a fine artist, which I am actually grateful for. My commercial background taught me about discipline and the real world.

You work with different mediums and you also often layer your paint works, covering colours and images, sometimes still revealed in the background. How do you think different mediums affect the impact of your work and its meaning? Is there a significance or subconscious aspect to the layering?

The layering is interesting. There definitely is a subconscious aspect especially with paint and canvas. Sometimes there can be so many layers that the canvas gets physically heavy, for instance if I have painted over things repeatedly to get them just right. When we hang the show you’ll see that some works are much heavier than others, there’s a physical layering in my paintings which compliment their psychological aspect.

I tend to go through intense phases of working with different mediums. I’ve worked with ceramics, bronze, recently I started a course in stain-glass windows. It’s a course near my house and because it's so colourful, I really wanted to see my work in the medium.

Dan smiles.

I haven't told anyone because I'm still working on my first piece. I’ve chosen the colours, Yves Klein blue, red, yellow, orange and now I’ve got my composition. Down the line I’d like to be set up so I can make my own glass works here. In my ideal studio I'd have canvases, works on paper, ceramics there, bronzes over here, steel sculptures on the go and on my table I’d have stained glass windows. I’ve always liked mixed mediums so I just get excited about variety.

My ceramic work started because I began doodling on a ceramic pot I'd bought from the pound shop whilst waiting for the kettle to boil. I was so pleased with the results that I went to a painter-pottery cafe and I would paint on their biggest pots with a coffee, then the cafe would glaze them for me. Eventually, the woman from the cafe introduced me to a potter, which began a joint endeavour where he would create the ceramics and I would paint them. It became the most incredible journey and I got very absorbed in the whole medium. The pots became more and more advanced, using platinum, mother of pearl, with domed lids...they were epic.

Eventually my relationship with that potter came to an end, but I was asked about doing some bronze sculptures by a foundry in Athens. They specialised in the lost wax technique of casting, they could cast anything and turn it into a bronze. I started to get absorbed in bronze, I would send the foundry things I’d made to cast. I sent a taxidermied mouse on a hand grenade. The mouse was innocent and cute but he was holding the pin. I called it ‘The Love of Pain’. It was a wonderful bronze.

Dan disappears for a moment and comes back holding a tiny silver bird skeleton

This was cast from a real bird skeleton for a piece called ‘Nest’. I get very excited by different mediums. I did about 9 or 10 bronzes, years of ceramics and print making, a laser-cut sculpture in steel and now I’m working on my first stained-glass windows. My dream is to work on everything and have it all around me. It’s all the same message, I’m saying the same thing on a pot as on a piece of paper. It’s the transformation I love, when clay becomes pot, when bird becomes bronze.

Dan continues to play with the bronzed bird in his hands.

As we say our goodbyes, I'm struck by how Dan himself seems to embody the very tensions he paints; the playful and the profound, the nostalgic and the forward-looking. His studio, cluttered with paints and drum kits, jaguar bonnets and tiny silver birds, feels less like a workspace and more like a living, breathing collage. Whatever the medium, the message remains the same: life is fragile, fleeting and, in Baldwin's hands, full of quiet wonder.