VALDA BAILEY

VALDA BAILEY

17 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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VALDA BAILEY

It's the Atlantic, you know...

The Med is too sociable. The Caribbean is just a little bit too pleased with itself. The English Channel can be a bit sullen. And the Sargasso Sea is frankly weird. No. It has to be the Atlantic.

VALDA BAILEY

Me and my Knotty Pated Fool

I've spent far more time than is probably healthy trying to understand what a large language model actually is. Not how to use it – that part is easy enough – but what sort of thing it is. I will happily admit I wouldn't be without it. In recent months, it has helped me decipher lengthy legal documents, understand Portuguese tax laws, negotiate my way through a largely incomprehensible tax portal, push back in reasonably fluent Portuguese on a pitifully inadequate insurance offer, and handle do

VALDA BAILEY

Drawing in the Dark

In 1954 Cy Twombly spent his weekends in a dark hotel room, degrading a line he had spent years learning to make. Shiraga threw the brushes away because his hands were too trained. A question for photographers whose camera movement has gone smooth: rut, or signature?

VALDA BAILEY

Flying White

Chinese calligraphy has a delightful name for the happy accident. When the brush moves fast, the ink breaks and white paper flashes through the stroke. Calligraphers call it feibai, flying white, and they have prized it for two thousand years.

VALDA BAILEY

The Art of Failing to Copy

Say the word copying to a room full of photographers and watch everyone suddenly become very interested in their shoes. On the deliberate kind of copying, the kind that takes time.

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 supposedly slipped a small box of paints into the Louvre, persuaded a friend to distract the guard, and disappeared to retouch one of his own paintings while it hung on the wall – a finished painting hanging in the Louvre, if you please! It would be good enough for most of us. Except Bonnard thought otherwise. I've already talked about how much time I've wasted on the Studio At

VALDA BAILEY

Beyond the Shutter

The single frame was never the point. New York, 2011. A hungry gathering of students 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 was still every inch a pretender, still in thrall to Flickr, where everything is a 'great capture!!!' and the likes get doled out like jelly beans. An instant sugar rus