Andrew Baines

Biography

In January 2023, seven people stood in Rundle Mall, a pedestrian street in central Adelaide, covered from head to foot in gold paint. They included AFLW player Erin Phillips, Adelaide Fringe director Heather Croall, the Kaurna elder Uncle Mickey O’Brien, the state’s Human Services Minister Nat Cook and former A-League striker Bruce Djite. The commission came from the charity Lutheran Care, and Andrew Baines chose gold for its irony: it is associated with wealth. Each of the seven represented a different form of homelessness.

This is what his manner looks like in his mature years.

Baines was born in Colchester, England; sources give his year of birth as either 1962 or 1963, and 17 June 1962 is adopted here. As an infant he moved with his parents to South Australia. He grew up in the beachside suburb of Grange and spent holidays on the coast: on the Yorke Peninsula, at Rapid Bay, at Normanville and on Kangaroo Island. His father was an electrician who played soccer at a semi-professional level; his mother loved painting, reading and music. He was given pencil and paper as soon as he could sit up. A kindergarten teacher was astonished by his drawing of the neighbourhood seen from above. At ten he attended classes at the Henley and Grange Art Society and drew cartoons for a school soccer newsletter at two dollars each. By eleven he was selling pencil sketches to teachers and parents for five dollars. After Seaton High School, in 1979, at sixteen, he went to work at the John Martin’s department store, where he made artwork for the “Magic Cave” and backdrops for window displays. There he met his future wife, Jacqueline. In 1980–81 he studied at the South Australian School of Art at Underdale, but classes clashed with his soccer training, and he went back to the store. In his twenties he discovered Andy Warhol, David Hockney, Pro Hart and Ken Done. By his own account, he saw in them the life he wanted.

In 1984 he left the store and turned to his firm Baines Graphics (founded in 1983): murals, cartoons and other graphic work for BP, the Australian Grand Prix and the South Australia Soccer Federation. He became a full-time painter in 1999, on his wife’s advice. During the financial crisis of 2008 he ran up debts and nearly found himself homeless. I suspect this lies behind his later interest in homelessness, though there is no direct evidence of it.

Baines calls himself a “quasi-surrealist painter and installation artist”. Since 2005 he has staged dozens of installations on Australian beaches. In “The Coalition of the Constipated” (August 2012, Henley Beach), twelve people in suits sat on toilets at the water’s edge reading newspapers: the action called for public toilets on the beach, and the politician Amanda Vanstone took part. In “Waiting for the Bus” (September 2012) one hundred men in bowler hats lined up along the beach and struggled to read newspapers in the wind. “Busselton Bovines” (February 2011) put five Holstein Friesian cattle in the sea; the news went around the world. For “Post Modern Backyard” (May 2011), eight Hills Hoist clotheslines were brought from Adelaide to Bondi Beach. At dawn in the surf at Bondi, former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull stood holding an umbrella with a hundred volunteers in suits. “Doorways to Potential” (January 2013) was a fundraiser for the charity Common Ground Adelaide, which assists homeless people: participants, among them the former minister Alexander Downer, each paid A$1,500. “Sea of Knowledge” (February 2014) gathered people in their seventies, eighties and nineties on the beach.

He has taken commissions: a book cover for Surf Life Saving in South Australia, a wine label for Wirra Wirra Vineyards, and a CD cover for ABC Classics featuring the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra’s principal tuba player. His favourite is a portrait of John Dawkins, a former member of the South Australian Legislative Council, which hangs in Parliament House, Adelaide. In 2014, with Aaron Schuppan and Carlo Petraccaro, he made a short film, “Escape of the Corporate Battery Hens”, shown at The Arts Theatre in Adelaide in January 2015.

Baines has been appointed an art adviser to the United Nations and is working on a project about microplastics in the ocean for Harmony Day. Each year he commits himself to two charity projects. He has not won a major prize, but has been a finalist for the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize (2004, 2006), the Mortimore Art Prize for Surrealism (2012), the Nora Heysen Art Prize for Still Life (2011) and others. As of 2022 his work had not entered the Art Gallery of South Australia. In the same period a solo exhibition, “The Search for Sanity”, was held at BMGArt. He lives and works in Grange.