We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Carrie Baines. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Carrie below.

Hi Carrie, thanks for joining us today. One of the things we most admire about small businesses is their ability to diverge from the corporate/industry standard. Is there something that you or your brand do that differs from the industry standard? We’d love to hear about it as well as any stories you might have that illustrate how or why this difference matters.

I have a lot of freedom being an oil painter. I’m my own boss, I make my own decisions. Even in painting custom pieces, I decide if it’s something I’d enjoy painting, and am able turn a job down for any reason.

The older I get, the fewer custom jobs I want to accept, as I prefer the freedom of painting exactly what I want to paint, when I want to paint it.

I would say that I work very well without direction or prodding. I have a desire to paint almost all of the time, although sometimes breaks are necessary due to life events. I need no management or convincing in order to produce.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

My lifelong goal has always been to be a full-time oil painter, and now I finally am one. The road getting here was long, and I do realize how fortunate I am.

I grew up in Montana. My dad was an occasional oil painter, and gave me a box of his old paints when I was a kid. I taught myself to paint on canvas panels and eventually earned an extremely small scholarship to the School of Art, Montana State University, Bozeman.

In hindsight, I should have majored in Graphic Design instead of Fine Arts, but my brain hadn’t finished gelling. I made the economically harebrained decision to major in Fine Arts with an emphasis on oil painting.

As everyone knows, it’s virtually impossible to support yourself by selling your paintings, especially right out of college. Life as a starving artist is such a cliché. I didn’t want to become that, so I took a job in the composing room at a Montana newspaper instead of painting. I pasted up newspaper pages every night with editors directing me. That job enabled me to eat and pay rent. This was obviously before newspapers were designed on the Macintosh.

Eventually I moved to that same newspaper’s graphics department, where I designed ads. I was lucky enough to work alongside a guy who had been to a prestigious design school, and was very generous with his graphic design knowledge. He basically taught me what I would have learned in 2 years of graphic design school.

I learned a lot on the job from back then from all of my coworkers, and I was able to correct my mistake of majoring in the wrong field pretty quickly.

Later, I moved on to an ad agency as an Assistant Art Director in Park City, Utah where I continued to learn. My colleagues at the ad agency were on an elite level as far as graphic design goes, and it was challenging to keep up, but I learned so much. At that time, I also had a side-gig as a greeting card illustrator and gag writer for a company in Vermont. Occasionally I painted in my free time, using chalk pastels instead of oil paints because it was easier when living in small apartments. My desire to paint kept breaking through, even though I was pretty busy.

My final job, out in the workforce, was in Colorado — as an Art Director of a magazine, and I was still learning. I was right there as the Macintosh completely took over the graphic design world. We went from using wax, paper and Xacto knives to using QuarkXpress and Adobe Illustrator. It was a drastic change, and there were so many bumps in the road. Computers had so little memory back then and they crashed constantly. Modems were dial-up, and there was always a technical Macintosh problem to solve. It seems that I spent half of my time solving dire technical issues. For example, if we imported of a photo or illustration that had a few too many kilobytes, we’d lose entire nights of sleep over the ensuing problems it caused. We were constantly updating to the latest model of Macintosh or adding more memory. It was crazy. I had no time to even consider oil painting.

Finally, when I got married, and we bought a house, I was able to start to think about painting once again because I had far more room in which to paint,

With the birth of our first child, I left my Art Director job, and continued to supplement our income by doing freelance graphic design at home — on my first personal Macintosh computer —instead of painting.

Eventually though, I did manage to do a few oil paintings. The desire to paint was still strong, but while our kids were small, there were lots of rubber balls, etc. hitting wet canvases, so my painting was pretty limited. I sandwiched those few paintings in between children rearing and freelance graphic design.

I found myself wood-burning thrift store tables, lamps etc. and then oil painting them. This was more easily accomplished than canvas painting with small children around. I had the wood pieces for sale at a galley in Utah, and a shop on lower Pearl St. in Boulder. This was fulfilling for several years, but I ultimately wanted to get back to painting canvases.

Raising three kids is truly the most fun I’ve ever had, and it went unbelievably fast. I finally was able to paint full time in 2011 when the kids were all pretty self-sufficient, and I had a lot of free time. My husband was obviously the breadwinner, which enabled me to paint.

I paint mostly from my own photography. I feel no shame in being a studio painter instead of a plein air painter. Of course I would be a plein air painter if photography didn’t exist — but it does.

I don’t like the dry Colorado wind blowing while I paint. I don’t tolerate heat well, I don’t want to be approached while painting, then there’s the effort it takes to pack the easel… other than that, it sounds fun. I admire the plein air painter, but I’ll never be one.

I often use several different sources to make one composition. I’m always thinking of the painting when I take photos. My thinking is that if I took the photo, the painting originates totally from me.

Occasionally, I’ll use photos that one of my kids or husband took, or in the case of bear portraits, I will use several photos taken by others as sources and combine them to paint my own bear. I wish I could photograph bears, but they are scary, and aren’t out there like the more easily photographed cows, sheep and goats.

My art is largely representational. Lots of animals, oceans, gardens, cityscapes… but I’ve lately become obsessed with abstract painting. I don’t think anyone can do a good abstract painting without a lot of design knowledge. Many good abstract painters start out as good representational painters.

Are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

Digital photography has been great for me as a painter. I used to paint from slides, which was expensive and awkward. Now, I can take as many photos of a goat as I want to, and not have to pay for slide development. There is no need to limit my choices of sources. It’s amazingly different and so much easier than in previous decades. Wow, I’m old.

How’d you meet your business partner?

I have several paintings in a wonderful gallery now — the Western Art Gallery in Golden Colorado. How did that happen? One of my daughters had a great job with a great boss. One day, her boss was commenting on one of my oil paintings on the wall of my daughter’s office.

Apparently, he’d long had an interest in becoming an oil painter, and I started answering his questions by email and giving a few tips. He picked it up quickly, and a few years later eventually retired from his job and purchased a space for a new gallery. I was very fortunate to be asked to display my paintings in his large, brand new gallery.

The moral of the story is that while small, kids can limit your ability to paint, but later they will get you into a gallery.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://bainesgallery.blogspot.com
• Instagram: bainesgallery
• Facebook: https://facebook.com/bainesgallery
• Other: I have several paintings at:

  Western Art Gallery
  www.wag.art

  Facebook: Western Art Gallery
  Instagram: Western Art Gallery

Image Credits

Not applicable