Interview

Written By Editorial Team

David Lewis-Baker

David is a successful English erotic, abstract and portrait digital artist currently living in Bath, England. He is also a street and art photographer. David has exhibited his works in solo and group exhibitions in Bath, Bristol, Rome, Paris and London.

Born in 1950 in Boston Lincolnshire, his formative years as an artist were spent in London and New York. He is an autodidactic artist who had already drawn and painted hundreds of works by the time he was in his mid-20s.  

David has academic qualifications to Doctoral level, and an extensive CV of publications based upon his academic career. He is also a published poet. 

His artworks have been used for various publications, and also in a movie in the U.S.. His limited-edition giclée prints, as well as his mixed media art and photographic works, are held in private collections throughout the world.

 

What is your background and how did you start your journey in the art world?

“I developed a childhood passion for drawing and painting, encouraged by a school art teacher, Janet Bailey, who gave me free private tuition. I maintained this practice throughout my adult life in a successful academic career, culminating at Warwick University as a professor of politics. I retired from this position in 2006 after a health breakdown. I then decided to become a full time artist, and I felt that was what I should always have been. 

As an academic, I made periodical visits across the globe, teaching and attending conferences. This allowed me to absorb original world class art and photography in public and private gallery collections across the UK and the world. As part of my self-education, I assembled and devoured a large collection of fine art and photo art monographs. 

At Warwick, I used art as a form of therapy in an increasingly pressurized academic life. I managed this by switching to digital art, initially using scanned-in drawings and watercolors, later generating the works digitally. I never adopted the Photoshop digital route. Instead, I used smaller art and photography programs and later apps, which avoids the standard Photoshop ‘look’. This also suited my wish to keep a painterly aesthetic to my artwork.”

“After retiring from academia, I have used the digital art tools and photography to create a wide variety of works, ranging from abstract and semi-abstract digital art and fine art photographic artworks, to digital and photographic portraits, street photographs, conceptual art and fine art photography. Over the past ten years, I have created a major output of erotic works.

I get all the critical attention I require from my various on-line art sites, which receive millions of hits each year. I also use the virtual environment to share critiques and associate with a truly international group of artists and art lovers.”

What inspires you most?

“Everything visual inspires me, aided by the fact that I have a photographic memory for visual images and colors. I also possess strong conceptual abilities, which draw upon the academic and philosophic side of my mind. Some conceptual works are inspired by political and social themes, including hypocrisy, lying and untruths, and issues of poverty and wealth. Others are motivated by my strong sense of irony and humor, especially in my street photography.

Many of my abstract and semi abstract works are inspired by a love of geometric patterns and strong color relationships. Others are generated by more free-flowing expressionist and subliminal gestural impulses, drawing upon my inner-self and instincts. In recent years, this aspect of my practice has become an increasingly central to my creative life.

Generally, the key influences on my works originally came from Cubism, Fauvism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Expressionism, Abstraction and lately, conceptual and photographic fine art.”

“As I neared my seventies and saw my life reaching its conclusion, the artist in me felt it his duty to reveal my BDSM side, having hidden it from almost everyone who knows me for most of my life. This was partly out of feelings of shame for my urgent need for submission from the loving women who honored me by giving me their trust, respect and love. There was also a linked fear of how revealing this side of me would affect all my ‘normal’ relationships. So, too, with my arousal by fetish clothing, including latex, leather and silk. It is the artist that unlocked this part of me through his erotic art.

Pornography depicts sex acts sold for money for masturbation, while erotic art employs art techniques to express beauty, mystery, desire, love, seduction and attraction. My erotic art does not generally depict explicit sexual intercourse or the sexual organs. However, I do occasionally create works including male and female genitalia, none of which are shown or shared in public.”

“My art is inspired by my love of many forms of music, from classical to electronica. 

My geometric abstracts are like Bach’s music; formal and structured exercises in rigorous forms of rhythmic beauty. Some of my erotic art is like soul music, and my expressionist portraits and abstract works are akin to psychedelic rock-blues, or free expression jazz.”

What themes do you pursue? Is there an underlying message in your work?

“The themes of my street photography are based around a candid celebration of humans acting unconsciously and instinctively in public settings, arranging themselves into strange combinations and patterns, or displaying strong facial expressions, whether consciously or unconsciously. 

Street photography is a form of documentary photography, but it is decidedly not straight reportage, and rarely simply records an event.

I also seek out strong color relationships in my street work, or powerful contrasts of shadow and light, in my monochrome street work.”

“In my abstract works, I create and celebrate the beauty of harmonious relationships between colors and pure forms. Pure abstractions are in effect ideas—visual, intellectual, and emotional—reproduced as patterns based on forms, structures or colors. 

Abstraction strips away the familiar representative narrative and replaces it with what at first sight may appear as formless complexity, or formless simplicity in some minimalist abstractions like those of Rothko. Thus, abstract artists employ patterns overtly in their abstract works, whereas non abstract artists tend to hide them away in their more representative ones.”

“In my erotic works I seek to evoke human sensuality in relation to the wider BDSM aesthetic, including the look, touch and feel of erotic cloth and fetish clothing against human skin, or the sense of bondage restrictions. There’s also the feeling of pleasure from pain, and especially the delicious feelings during power exchanges between Dominant and Submissive partners in boudoirs, play dungeons, dark forests, or abandoned building settings.”

How would you describe your work?

“Beautiful and challenging painterly digital fine art, candid street photography and sophisticated art photography, crossing boundaries in genre, content and style, but always recognizable as mine.”

“My art is how I come to recognize myself and grow—the expression of the inner man.

My work does not preach, but may challenge conventional assumptions. If it has any underlying message, it’s that I’m on a journey of self-discovery, and wish to share this with others for their pleasure and interest.

It is a journey which has yet to reach a destination, and most probably never will.”

Which artists influence you most?

“My erotic art is inspired by Egon Schiele, Salvador Dali, Man Ray, Tamara Lempicka, and Edward Weston, among others. 

My abstract, semi abstract and other painterly artworks are inspired by Paul Klee, Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Pablo Picasso, and Wassily Kandinsky, among others. 

My street and fine art photography is influenced by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Josef Koudelka, Francesca Woodman, and Sally Mann, among others.”

“One famous street photographer, Garry Winograd said: ‘I photograph things to see what they look like photographed.’ 

The best street photography is remarkable because it makes something ordinary seem suddenly extraordinary. This is one of the chief aims of my work.”

 What is your creative process like?

“All my creative art processes are practiced within the digital medium. Some works start as scanned images, others are constructed digitally, or based upon my photographs, or from images appropriated from the web.

I have multiple artworks in different genres under construction concurrently, with multiple variations of the same image created consecutively. Most of these variations are deleted afterwards, with the most interesting ones retained for finishing.”

“I work super-fast because I have complete command of color, form and composition. This is not just in the digital medium, which facilitates fast creation, but also because I am very fast as a conventional medium artist too.

I also regularly return to old images to rework them based on the development of my ideas since I first created the works. 

I have stored data bases of well over 100,000 of my digital artworks and photographs, some being finished works, others raw photographs, and some in various stages of completion, and another 50,000 plus of works which were created by others that I find inspiring or interesting.”

What is an artist’s role in society and how do you see that evolving?

“Art transcends the ordinary, inspiring and transforming both artist and consumer. My role as an artist is to challenge, delight, and disturb both myself and the viewer. I try to do this by arranging otherwise familiar objects and visual subjects into new juxtapositions of color, form, composition, perspective, and exposing new aesthetic and conceptual relationships. Otherwise, fine art would simply be the process of reproducing the finest past art forms. 

Fine art and fine art photography is often a radical and disruptive form of practice, far removed from the creation of visual harmony and ‘beauty’ assumed by many in society. This does not, of course, exclude works of great aesthetic beauty being created. 

In the near future, AI software will create countless images of places and people who do not exist in the real world, but are indistinguishable from real world objects and individuals. This will open up huge new possibilities for digital artists like myself.”

Please tell us about any previous exhibitions you found noteworthy and wish to share.

“In recent years I’ve had three important large solo exhibitions at the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution (BRLSI). 

I had gallery representation in London for a while. After the gallery closed in 2013, I decided not to seek another gallery since my work was selling well via my websites. For a while, I employed an artistic agent to represent me, but that has also ceased.”

 
Editorial Team
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