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Paul Baines

Artist, Illustrator, Designer Nationality: UK Currently Living: St.Leonards on Sea, UK. Education: Ba Hons. Conceptual Media and Design Brighton University

I take a logical and atavistic approach to art. I filter the popular media and public opinion, raising notions of false hindsight and the collective consciousness. The power of the media, the intellectual endowment of the ruling elite, and the deconstruction of language have led us to a unique point in history.

Namely the end of a linear consciousness in our self-awareness as society, as the archetypal individual, and of the resultant subjectivism of notions of objectivity.

The social experiment has completed, we as a race must look forward to existing in our proposed futures and archived pasts, as we individually exist in a perceptually enhanced model of what was once described as ‘real time’.

Our faith is that of celebrity and monetary clout, our church is the altar of mass media, our purpose is the avoidance of self-reflection and the analysis of existence beyond the ‘now’, whatever the cost.

Our future is bleak, society is skimming through the proverbial photo album of our collective cultural history; amending, editing, and re-interpreting it through a perceptual mantra of post-modernism, and vice-versa.

My approach to creating art is simple, if the subject at hand is a target for public consciousness, if it is a subject of or delivery system towards a subjective delivery system, I make attempts to redress the balance, and aim to utilise the Internet to engage in a multi-discplinary interpersonal exchange of ideas and actions.

As a modern artist from the UK, Paul Baines can be described as an iconic artist, a pop culture artist, and definitely nothing less than an original street artist producing hip art that speaks to modern day pop culture.  This thought provoking original underground art, referred to by many as modern UK art, pushes to the forefront of creativity the obsession that the mass media has with iconic figures.  It’s cool art, it’s controversial, and it’s edgy.  This visual street art by an undiscovered artist truly is the definition of pop culture art.

Doomsayer (44" x 55") by Paul Baines is the ninth limited edition print in the Indoor Street Art series available here. We live in a world of perpetual fear, our history is based upon it, our belief systems, as varied as they are will always rely on its power to instil a greater message than a current ideology can either generate or harbour within one era, it empowers governments, feeds the media, and sells merchandise by the truck load.

Fear breeds fear, fear and in particular Man’s misinterpretation of his destiny manifest opens the doors to twisted wisdom, unfounded knowledge and biased intellect that only hindsight can reveal as the propaganda it truly is. 2012, as with its former incarnation 1999, has been nailed down as the latest date prophesying the end of the world. Fewer and fewer individuals pay heed to the doomsayers of this world, the problems are obvious enough as it is without the flawed logic and misinterpreted historical texts of Mayan symbols, Nostradamus’s texts and a plethora of astrological mutterings from the glossies to best-selling paranoid rantings of pulp fiction meets fact authors, who have generation by generation relied on the plebeian beliefs of the dullest minds for the cash cow that is the "prophecy game".

‘Black Christ‘ by Paul Baines depicts Barack Obama as Christ. This work deals with the rise of the political icon as celebrity in modern history. The process of emancipation and martyrdom of the worldwide mass-media.

The hopes and fears of an inauspicious geopolitical geoculture; reared on fear and controlled by social fragmentation, re-engaging with the ancient practices of organised religion and its symbolic ceremonies to enshrine all positions of power, be they political, economic, or mere celebrity.

‘The Madonna‘ by Paul Baines cites the popular music performer Madonna as an indicator of the insubstantiation of the Christian belief system. The Western government no longer feels it economically viable to support organised religion, with the exception of minority religions, mainly imported, for the fear of cultural backlash and in some circumstances, terrorist reprisals.

Madonna Louise Ciccone Ritchie (born August 16, 1958), American recording artist and performer recently invited the world to celebrate her half-centenary, her carefully orchestrated coronation as the eternal matriarch of the modern age was a political success. Her image remains intact, although the shift in consciousness reveals a new encroachment of populist thinking over subjective and spiritual enquiry. The siren meets the mother.

More from Paul Baines at  paulbaines.co.uk