1st Prize Winner
Victoria Olt Gallery Drawing Award

Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize 2025

Brian Bailey

Title:

“Deep”

Medium & Dimensions:

Pastel on paper, 41 x 27 in.

About the Artist

Brian E. Bailey was born in Lancaster, Massachusetts. Formerly a professor at the School of Visual Arts in New York, he now paints and teaches privately in New Jersey. Following a successful career that spanned several decades as a noteworthy illustrator, he began to focus his energies on more personal artistic pursuits. He has won numerous awards for his work in pastel and has been featured in select exhibitions both nationally and abroad. Most recently his work has been shown at several exhibitions at the European Museum of Modern Art in Barcelona, Spain as well as Sotheby’s in New York , NY. His work has been exhibited at ARTLIFE FEST in Moscow, Russia, and the International Pastel Biennial in Suzhou, China, as well as several exhibitions at the Butler Museum of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio, the Salmagundi Club and the National Arts Club in NYC. His work is in several public and private collections including the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. As an artist working in a realist tradition he tries to create singular contemporary images that speak to the fragility of both the natural world and the human condition. The stillness of his painting offers the viewer a moment of both contemplation and reflection. “ In my painting there is nothing I take away, nor give artifice to enhance the quiet permanence of a subject’s beauty.” Brian Bailey PSA MP, IAPS EP

“Deep”: is a figurative work depicting a friend’s struggle with depression. A lifelong battle with the illness took its toll on both relationships and family members. Her accounts of the episodes were of being twisted and dragged down to the bottom of the sea, as if boulders were pulling her deeper and deeper. Hence the title “Deep”.