Known for a vibrant style that is recognizable across a range of media including painting, printmaking, ceramics, book and album covers, and clothing design collaborations, contemporary British artist Dan Baldwin has exhibited and sold his works worldwide alongside such Young British Artist Movement colleagues as Banksy, Damien Hirst, and Sir Peter Blake.
Baldwin combines rich, saturated colors alongside bright, often neon ones to create energetic, intriguing, visual tapestries and environments. Abstract, painterly, expressionistic strokes reflect his appreciation for artists such as Jean-Michael Basquiat and Robert Rauschenberg, whereas his renditions of more identifiable elements, often highly personal in nature, can range from curious or ominous to playful and cartoonish, and may hark back to his 1995 undergraduate degree in illustration from Kent Institute of Art and Design in England.
“My work is always about life, harmony & balance but often explores the fine line between that and death. I love to contradict and put opposing factors together, innocence with decay, symbolism and religion, nature and war…. I want to present elements that force a dialogue between all the elements and make the viewer think about their connections. It all links.”
The two canvases comprising the present lot, “Cherry Blossom I” and “Cherry Blossom II,” are each worthy of standing on their own as finished works of art. Baldwin, however, intended that they be viewed as a diptych: “… we see two rooms, two interiors, the kind of familiar domestic interiors that should inspire a sense of safety and comfort. In one, we see my mantelpiece, the clock always set to 2:40, or twenty to three: 23 being my favourite number and the date of my birth. The rooms are populated with symbols of refuge; the bird returning to the nest, children climbing the stairs. The inclusion of the VW Beetle in Cherry Blossom II also has very a personal meaning; it was my first car and I restored it with my stepfather, it was also the means for getting to art college and finding independence. At the same time these cosy rooms are invaded by a sense of time passing, the fragility of memory; a cracked vase, a barbed wire fence, a fire, rain clouds. And finally the cherry blossom, which in Japanese culture is a reminder that life is overwhelmingly beautiful, but also tragically short.”
The enduring power and popularity of this diptych was already verified in 2016 when, just one year after Dan Baldwin finished the paintings shown here, he granted CCA Galleries in Surrey, England permission to publish them as a limited edition of 100 hand-signed, color screenprints on paper printed by Coriander Studio in Isleworth, England. The screenprinted versions were reduced in scale to approximately 34″ H x 31.5″ W, and could be purchased either individually or as a pair, with the latter intended to most closely echo Baldwin’s original concept whereby the two paintings would be viewed side by side as the unique lot offered here.
