June 27 - October 11, 2026
ArtYard | Frenchtown, NJ
Curator’s Statement | Jill Kearney | Founder & Executive Director, ArtYard
There is a Shakespearean majesty to David Bailin’s large scale drawings on milk carton overstock of humans mired in sink holes of their own making. The drawings entangle the viewer’s emotions in webs of empathy and anger. These characters ought to be rescued, or perhaps they deserve their comeuppance, or what is a person meant to feel watching this slow-motion train wreck cum Divine Comedy of men in suits?
Other works are excavations marked by layers of erasures that conjure the disappearance of a loved one in a cloud of dementia. Bailin works and reworks his drawings, erasing and drawing over the same surface, sometimes over a period of years.
Landscape and weather systems feature prominently in these quiet, troubling, resolute masterworks. There is a seductive beauty to his tableaux of yearning, hubris and self-delusion rendered with loving attention to light and line.
Artist Statement
When I decided back in the 1990s that the logo to my first website would be “He left a Paper Trail,” I thought it was a humorous take on my commitment to create works on paper. After all these years though, leaving a paper trail has become my artistic practice as well as a legacy built on all the resulting drawings, successful or otherwise, of that practice.
The activities my characters perform and the emotions they demonstrate within the interiors and exteriors I draw haven’t changed much in the years covered by this exhibition: a man, or men, searching, digging, arranging, collecting, confused, amused, dumbfounded, driven, angry, exhausted, forever battling against something beyond the edge of the page and leaving footprints, papers, books, and other objects in his/their wake, persevering no matter how absurd that action may be.
I spend a lot of my time thinking through ideas and working on translating those ideas into images. I am not an artist who starts by playing with the materials or with some kind of ritual. Every drawing is a deep hole I've dug, climbed into and then attempted to get out of…a back-and-forth process of drawing in and erasing out, from having an idea or image revealing itself one minute then becoming part of the traces left on the surface like paper trails.
