Colin Bailey is an artist and printmaker living and working in Hastings, East Sussex after living in Rye for ten years and Kings Cross, London for fifteen years.
As a painter and etcher with a love of traditional methods and techniques, and with a printmaker’s instinct for multiple images, Colin has also accepted the advance of recent technology and makes full use of digital photography, high resolution scanning and archival quality giclée printing to reproduce his paintings.
As a popular Rye artist Colin Bailey realised the wider appeal of this small picturesque area of England’s south east coast and established Ryepress as a showcase for his Rye and St Pancras etchings. Now in Hastings, with a growing reputation as a Hastings artist he has expanded his portfolio and has produced a series of paintings which he scans and reproduces as limited edition fine art giclée prints, handling this whole process himself in order to maintain quality and artistic integrity.
As well as traditional views of Rye & Hastings, there is also a series of paintings exploring the weather-beaten coastal textures and structures of Rye Bay (the East Sussex coast between Hastings and Dungeness); Ancient groynes, banks of constantly shifting shingle, fishing boats drying on the beach, and the prehistoric coast at the foot of the cliffs at Rock-a-Nore are examined in paintings with an almost abstract scale and attention to detail. Close-up and often ambiguous, these images of peeling, faded paintwork, rusting metal and cracked, bleached wood chart the results of man-made and natural structures slowly breaking up through the relentless onslaught of rain, wind, sun, sea, sand and time.
Colin Bailey exhibits frequently in various venues and with local art groups in Rye, Hastings, Tenterden, and East Sussex. See Exhibitions for details of forthcoming shows.
Ryepress has now opened in the centre of Hastings old town. Situated in the well known Retro shop in Hastings High street this etching studio and gallery joins a growing collection of galleries in what is fast becoming East Sussex’s newest centre for the arts.
With the eponymous Rye press now once again up and running, the studio will be featuring periodic etching demonstrations, with a unique opportunity to see the process in action and buy Colin Bailey's limited edition prints of Hastings, Rye and the East Sussex coast straight from the press.
Colin Bailey August 2008