Modern day brushes with Old World in exhibit

Seth Bailey is a young artist with an old soul. With paintbrush in hand, he reaches back through time, seeking inspiration from the legions of portraiture painters who came decades and centuries before him.

His work is delicate yet detailed, charming but classic. He applies paint to canvas in a way that transports his modern-day subjects centuries back in time.

"Americana," an exhibition by the Little Rock artist, will open Friday evening at The Art Group Gallery at Pleasant Ridge Town Center in Little Rock. The exhibit, featuring about a half dozen of Bailey's paintings, begins with a 6 p.m. reception and continues through the weekend.

Working with portraiture and in the style of the Old Masters is an artistic area the 33-year-old only recently began exploring.

"This is relatively new to me and came about when I decided to push myself artistically," Bailey says. "Before then, I'd been working with landscapes and impressionism, but one of my professors at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock told me I needed to push myself and that's when I began studying the Old Masters and I liked the end result."

Bailey says he believes the art scene in general is returning to the more traditional forms of art.

"As the world is changing, people are reaching for something more beautiful and precise; they are looking back to traditions that had been lost," he says. "I believe there is an art renewal of the Renaissance taking place."

Bailey, who works in oils, spends several months on each piece. The works to be unveiled in this weekend's reception are large, some measuring 4-by-5 feet and others at 3-by-5 feet. His current works include portraits and images of wildlife.

"He's very technical in his paintings and is very over-the-top obsessed with making them perfect and I mean that in a complimentary way," says Holly Tilley, who along with Bailey, is a member of The Art Group.

The Art Group, an artists collaborative originally named Art Group Maumelle based in that city, opened its gallery in Pleasant Ridge Town Center in early 2014. The gallery, which includes a working studio, is owned and operated by 16 artists. It offers a wide array of local, original fine art as well as commissioned pieces.

"Having the artists own and operate the gallery allows the customers to work directly with the artists, lets us visit with them, give the customer insight into the artwork, and allows us to keep the prices lower," Tilley says.

Bailey's paintings are inspired by the European Masters who perfected the process of blending earth tones with primary colors and layering multiple coats to create realistic portraits. In his "Americana" exhibit, he takes it a step further, experimenting with layering numerous coats of transparent glazes using traditional oils. The result? A collection of finely detailed and realistic portraiture of modern people in modern settings that hauntingly recall another time and place.

Bailey's influences include the works of Leonardo da Vinci, a leader of the Italian Renaissance who painted the Mona Lisa, and William-Adolphe Bouguereau, a 19th-century French painter best known for his works The Birth of Venus and The Bohemian.

In Bailey's most recent work, which has been described as "Old Europe meets modern America," he captures a sense of Old World classic timelessness in what is familiar and dear to him in his own modern world, which includes images of pastoral settings and intimate glimpses of family interaction.

For inspiration for his pastoral scenes, Bailey doesn't have to travel very far from home; he grew up on a farm in Ferndale where he still lives with his wife, Nataly, and their three children.

As a boy, he was introduced to and instructed in various art mediums by his father, Don Bailey, a master potter and metallurgist. Since then, he has apprenticed under master artists at UALR and continues to learn through experimenting daily in painting, blacksmithing, sculpting and drawing.

Bailey, who has been painting full time for about three years, is getting close to completing his bachelor's degree in fine arts at UALR. After that, he plans to pursue a master's degree in painting.

His previous jobs in between taking time off to help rear his children have included working as a chef at Best Impressions restaurant at the Arkansas Arts Center and catering with Robert "Chef Bob" Henry, who will provide European-style appetizers with an American twist for Bailey's reception.

Weekend on 09/10/2015