VALDA BAILEY

VALDA BAILEY

12 stories

I make art using photography and mixed media. My practice leans into imaginative abstraction, exploring what happens when a camera is freed from the burden of simply replicating what's in front of the lens. I teach at https://fyv.art

Pedra d Ouro, Portugal

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Latest Stories

VALDA BAILEY

The Silence Before the Song

What to do with loss? On moving to Portugal, the allure of fado and the line between drawing on a culture and decorating with it.

VALDA BAILEY

The Indecisive Moment

Never finished. Only trusted. Here's a story about Pierre Bonnard – it may be apocryphal but I like to think not. He is supposed to have slipped a small box of paints into the Louvre, persuaded a friend to distract the guard, and disappeared off to retouch one of his own paintings while it hung on the wall – finished, framed, hung. Job done. Except Bonnard thought otherwise. I mentally refer back to this story more often than I should. I have already detailed the ridiculous amount of time I

VALDA BAILEY

Beyond the Shutter

The single frame was never the point. New York, 2011. A restaurant a stone's throw from the Bowery. A hungry group of mature students gather after a gruelling day trying to unite light, colour and gesture into something that might earn an approving grunt from Jay Maisel. Ten of us round a table, mostly professional photographers. I had advanced since my first workshop with Jay, but I felt every inch a pretender. Still in thrall to Flickr, where everything is a 'great capture!!!' and the 'likes'

VALDA BAILEY

Someone was Here

For years the advice was the same, and I took it. A photographer's website should be a white room. Black or grey text, kept small. Nothing to distract from the pictures, no clutter, no personality. Let the work speak for itself. So I built mine that way. valdabailey.com is a clean grid of images on a pale neutral ground, just like all other artists' sites are clean grids of images on pale neutral grounds. It ticked all the boxes – albeit with a few defiant black rectangles dotted around. The epi

VALDA BAILEY

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(or is it?) Graphic design. Fonts. Colour. Margins. As a young teenager they held a strange fascination for me. On reflection, graphic design is a job that would have suited me well. However, as is so often the case, life took me down a different road and any fond ambitions I had of kerning words at midnight, moving logos three mm to the right then back again, or deciding which curly apostrophe was the right one for a Sunday remained a distant dream. The fork in my career path did not stop me

VALDA BAILEY

What's in a Name?

Why we chose Pedra do Ouro over the Algarve, the awkward language of expats and immigrants, and the appeal of a less polished life on Portugal’s Silver Coast.

VALDA BAILEY

50 Shades

Fifty grey fragments lifted from the Silver Coast – sea, sand, cloud, foam, the occasional sulky bit of almost-blue

VALDA BAILEY

Costa de Prata

Not silver as in jewellery – silver as a condition of the light. On the pewter, pink and inky moods of Portugal's Atlantic light, and starting again in a roofless studio.