Since the early 1960s, artist John Baeder has led an incredibly productive life as a fine artist, producing a wealth of painting, sculpture, watercolor, photography, and more. Haynes Galleries offers you the chance to revisit Baeder’s journey through small-town America.
Can you remember when gasoline cost 25 cents per gallon? Or when John F. Kennedy was elected president? It was during the “Swinging Sixties” that artist John Baeder began what would become a storied career — known for his paintings that captured a much simpler time in small-town America, whether that be classic aircraft, classic cars, or the roadside diners for which he is best known.
Opening June 30 at Haynes Galleries in Thomaston, Maine, “John Baeder: Work from 1962 to 2015” is a tantalizing retrospective that showcases the full breadth of Baeder’s artistic accomplishments. The Gallery writes, “‘John Baeder: Work from 1962 to 2015’ will include works from every point in Baeder’s career and thus present works in a variety of genres and media. His black-and-white photographs, originally taken in the 1960s before Baeder committed himself full time to painting, have only recently become available for display. Traveling through small-town America, Baeder photographed the rural poverty that still mired the South. He took his camera with him to Europe to explore not the grandiose architecture of the Old World but the mundane moments and lives of its ordinary people. These images are much more interested in the implied human relationships than in documenting the reality of the place.
John Baeder, “Charlies Diner,” oil, (c) Haynes Galleries 2016
“Any exhibition on John Baeder and his career would be incomplete without his diner paintings. Made in watercolor and oil over the course of his career, the diner paintings are Baeder’s most known and acclaimed works. As Jay Williams elegantly explains in the new book, Baeder ‘was able to subtly convey that each diner or mom-and-pop eatery was at the heart, or was the hearth, of its community—a skill far more important than simply recording the transitory details of roadside subjects.’”
To learn more, visit Haynes Galleries.
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