John Baird is a Melbourne artist who must have spent some considerable time observing and understanding Sydney Harbour because he captures it so magnificently! With a bold, flattened aesthetic, his scenes are at once familiar and real, but also border on the surreal in his conflation of the foreground and background. The image becomes ethereal, dreamlike, yet nostalgic.

Baird’s still lifes are equally imbued with nostalgia, as he reinterprets material remnants of sourced vintage wallpapers, fabric and flocking to reference connection with bygone eras. He says this reimagining of the old acts as ‘a coded diary lurking behind each work’, eliciting in the viewer a ‘knowing’ deep within ourselves of the landscape of his narrative.

I first bought a Baird still life years ago and have so enjoyed seeing it every day. There is a timelessness about his work that is deeply comforting - a connection to all that is earthly and stable, and yet it challenges convention by flattening the image and refiguring the picture plane to take us on a journey to a whole other place.

Love, love, love it.