About

Bruce L. Bailey, Artist

Bruce is a retired software engineer residing on New England’s south coast with his wife of 52 years, Susan. After decades in the steel, shipbuilding, construction and aerospace industries, he has returned to his first passions of painting, printmaking and sculpture.

Early Artistic Years

His earliest serious work, in the late 1960’s, came unplanned out of a mix of emotions and exuberance. He did a series of drawings with felt marker pens, and then hand-cut rubylith stencils from them (the equivalent of what is now done in Adobe Illustrator) to make silk screen prints. There were definite influences – Durer, Piranesi, Escher, Mayan and Indian stele – from sources to which he was exposed through museum visits, books and journals. He was also reading – Orwell, Sartre, Huxley, Eliot, Spengler, Faulkner, Chandler (and others) – which affected both his art and life.

Bruce attended the Boston University School of Fine Arts as a painting major for two years and continued painting and printmaking during the 1970s as time permitted.

Family and Career

In the period 1978 to 2015 Bruce was focused on raising a family and a career in aerospace. He also completed a degree in Electrical Engineering at Drexel University in Philadelphia, graduating Summa cum Laude. During that period, while he did very little artwork, he continued to read extensively in history, literature, philosophy, and science. This has given him a rich vein of material from which to work in visual media.

Artistic Rebirth and Philosophy

Bruce is currently engaged in ongoing study at the Center for Visual and Performing Arts at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. There he has studied with Andrew Nixon, Anthony Fisher, Suzanne Schireson, Bryan Mcfarlane, Adrian Tio and Eric Lintala  In the last four years he has filled in gaps missing from his previous experience and reconnected with the work he was doing in the 1970’s.

Thinking about Art 

“Although art may involve technology, (as mine increasingly does, for now) I don’t think of it as solving problems or even being about ideas. Its motivating materiel is emotions, feelings, beliefs. Aside from technical issues, what it does have in common with science and technology is discovery, but in the case of art, the discovery is of a song, a voice, an acknowledgement of the depth of human existence.”

“The reconnection with my earlier work has somewhat surprised me although I think I had some premonition that it would happen. I now have technology, tools, space and time not previously available to me.  I have been very fortunate in that this has resulted in an intense creative engagement.”