I have always been concerned with meaning, allusion and narrative – something outside “pure” painterly concerns. Barnett Newman made great “pure” paintings, but I have always felt that I was made of baser clay. I want to tell a story, even if that story is cryptic or fragmentary. Prior to 2011, the focus of my work for some years was a bastard hybrid of text and painterly abstraction (see On/Off above). The paintings would start as a chaotic series of marks, strokes and blobs (As I do now and have always done). And then while editing the mess, I would start stenciling on phrases – usually erasing the first few ideas and concurrently changing the painted ground. This typically involved a great deal of editing of every part of the work. Tone was very important to me – it was very easy to get too cute, too long, self-important, didactic, or just plain wrong in some way. The abstract elements needed to serve the words and vice versa. I always painted in a materially intensive way, and I liked the layer of declamation and collage-like frisson that the words added to the work. I also felt that the words removed a sense of safe ambiguity and fuzzy romanticism that I saw (and still see) in much abstract painting.

Andrew Baron, On/Off, 2008, oil on canvas, 46 x 75 in. Image: © and courtesy Andrew Baron.

I have always been concerned with meaning, allusion and narrative – something outside “pure” painterly concerns. Barnett Newman made great “pure” paintings, but I have always felt that I was made of baser clay. I want to tell a story, even if that story is cryptic or fragmentary.

Prior to 2011, the focus of my work for some years was a bastard hybrid of text and painterly abstraction (see On/Off above). The paintings would start as a chaotic series of marks, strokes and blobs (As I do now and have always done). And then while editing the mess, I would start stenciling on phrases – usually erasing the first few ideas and concurrently changing the painted ground. This typically involved a great deal of editing of every part of the work. Tone was very important to me – it was very easy to get too cute, too long, self-important, didactic, or just plain wrong in some way. The abstract elements needed to serve the words and vice versa. I always painted in a materially intensive way, and I liked the layer of declamation and collage-like frisson that the words added to the work. I also felt that the words removed a sense of safe ambiguity and fuzzy romanticism that I saw (and still see) in much abstract painting.

I also felt that the words removed a sense of safe ambiguity and fuzzy romanticism that I saw (and still see) in much abstract painting.

Having made and shown a number of paintings in this fashion, I simply got burned out on this particular dance and I was starting to think about the possibility of doing text-less work. I also realized that there were hundreds (thousands?) of other artists putting text in their work – some bad, some great. Chalk it up to my contrary nature and dislike of crowds – I was feeling a bit uncomfortable being labeled a “Text Artist.”

During an especially frustrating morning and afternoon in the studio, I began to feel testy. I had sanded and planed a largish canvas after the latest unsuccessful attempt to make something from nothing and coated the whole thing in a light grayish blue. I began to draw on the surface with a tube of umber and ended up executing the piece in about an hour or so. The result was spare, willfully ugly, and a bit sloppy. The title, We Are Pollution, (below) sums up the thematic thrust of the piece – a pessimistic reflection on human interaction and humanity in general. Formally, it really is more of a drawing than a painting, though that distinction was and is not all that important to me. I liked it (still do), deciding that it was “ok” to have an oddball piece in the rack.

Top: Andrew Baron, We Are Pollution, 2011, oil on canvas, 57 x 75 in.
Bottom: Andrew Baron, Old Boy, 2012, oil on canvas, 53 x 76 in.

Images: © and courtesy Andrew Baron. Click images to enlarge.

A subsequent large work, Old Boy (above), was intended to be a text work, but the words (“piss” 2x) within it take on a far more subservient role than previous word pieces. I was still attached to the textual element, but was beginning to feel that this might signal the end of this kind of this mode of working for me.

The next painting almost ended up as a text piece that used the slogan “Sleep Train Work Train Eat (Repeat).” Unhappy with the result, I decided to completely destroy it – scraping it down, then smoothing it with an electric sander. The finished work, Bag (below) became a monolithic image that had far more power (to my mind) than the erased painting – more depth, more mystery, more menace.

Andrew Baron, Bag, 2013, oil on canvas, 64 x 48 in.
Image: © and courtesy Andrew Baron. Click image to enlarge.

And so I abandoned the use of text in my painting, but not without some sacrifice. The text pieces had a factual coolness that my current work lacks. The current works have an emotional content that is a bit less dry, making their execution more straightforward, if no less difficult. They also may be more difficult to decode. But that’s something that I can live with (for now).

–Andrew Baron, April 2015

Andrew Baron studied at the Ohio State University and the San Francisco Art Institute. A 2011 New Jersey Arts Council fellow, he currently resides in Newark, New Jersey. He currently shows his work in New York and New Jersey. His first solo show in New York, Welcome Fellow Travelers will be up at R.Jampol Project(s) (191 Henry Street, NYC) through May 10, 2015.