Featured Artist at the e.Gallery: William Bailey

Featured Artist at the e.Gallery this week is a 20th Century artist of the Contemporary Realist movement, William Bailey [American, 1930-] Link: http://fineart.elib.com/fineart.php?dir=Alphabetical/Bailey_William

William Bailey was born in 1930 in Council Bluffs, Iowa, William Bailey is certainly American, but he has spent summers in his studio in the Italian countryside for more than forty years. The colors and feeling of Italy are important influences on his art. In American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America, Robert Hughes writes that Bailey’s “calm arrays of pots, jugs, eggs, and bowls make up an ideal form-world, Platonic in its removal from ‘the itch of desire.’ Nothing spills out, thrusts forward, or wants to be touched or possessed — the traditional solicitations of still-life painting, most materialistic of arts. They are as removed from touch (and as grandly articulate in their scale) as the facade of a fine quattrocento building, seen from the other side of the piazza … an extreme opposite to the American taste for works of art which bear the signs of their struggle, unedited, in their final form.”