Carrie Ann Baade
Carrie Ann Baade
Carrie Ann Baade is an American painter whose work has been described by Curator of Contemporary Art Margaret Winslow as "autobiographical parables combin(ing) fragments of Renaissance and Baroque religious paintings, resulting in surreal landscapes inhabited by exotic flora, fauna, and figures." The context and the compositional building blocks of her work are fragments of historical masterpieces
"“Each woman must cry and contribute her tears to a communal glass. By working together, perhaps one day they will produce enough tears to put out one fire and spare the one who is closest to immediate danger. To stop participating results in death.”"
"The title for this painting is from the Devil in the White City, a book about a murderer who destroyed women during the chaos surrounding the Chicago’s 1893 World Fair. The image of “manufacturing of tears” fit well with the imagery I had been collecting of towers of babel connected to crying Mary Magdalenes. I was interested in placing these Babel-Magdalenes so that they covered the landscape, each unable to move."
"My studio is a giant collage with images taped to the walls. By surrounding myself with images and fragments from paintings, I find relationships. From there I move things with tape to make a more specific composition of forms. It can be a slow process that sometimes takes years or a lightning fast instant when two things get stuck together and make a perfect new statement that I then render in paint."
"I was born in Louisiana going back upwards of 10 generations of southerners, on my mother’s side, back to Jamestown. The South is a place behind the times – it runs slower. The South taught me tradition, storytelling, nostalgia, and preservation which are prevalent in my paintings. Returning to the South after traveling around the world, I am learning and becoming more aware about how systemically flawed our country is and I hope to be a better ally for finding solutions. I don’t yet know how this developing awareness might express its way into my art but I am reading books this summer about institutional racism. Most of my painting ideas can be traced back to what I am reading."
"In creating the collage, the windmill was surreptitiously appeared…and it became apparent that is was there to blow debris into the Magdalene’s eyes and cause them to cry. In the process of collage, there are happy accidents that astound me. Next, I needed to figure out why they must cry and in my mind’s eye, I saw these structures all aflame. I realized that they were not merely sad but that they had to cry from danger of their own peril. For this reason, one is holding an onion…so as to produce more tears."
"I individually value the artists of the past but I also look at what I am doing like a quilt making."
