VALDA BAILEY

VALDA BAILEY

13 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 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 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