His body of colored pencil drawings and mixed media pieces is not likely to be a comfort to the comfortable, or to the lef His body of colored pencil drawings and mixed media pieces is not likely to be a comfort to the comfortable, or to the leftists, feminists, and aficionados of socio-political concerns in general. Narcissistic, embittered, playful, insulting and inflammatory, it is a delight to
those in need of the rowdier manuevers of untamed individuality. Entirely self-taught, Bailey rightly sees himself as a quasi-outsider. In THE VIDIOT (1982), his first drawing indicative of the work that was to come, a distant kinship with Heinrich Anton Mueller is evident. He later became an admirer of Adolf Wolfli and Martin Ramirez, though his work does not appear deeply indebted to these artists or to any single source. Bailey's patterning and and flaming palette lend an obliquely Native American sense to some of his work. Many of his figures seem "cartoonish", but what cartoons - or anything else - ever looked like the twisted, tortured protagonists of SILLY SILLY SILLY or A PRANKSTER'S CREED? And what outsider, folk artist or Surrealist ever dreamed a more aggresively irrational and sexually pungent combination of images and words than SO WHAT'S THIS YOU'VE GOT TO SAY YOUNG MAN? I find the work of William Bailey - this legacy of an ex-chessplayer, film writer, prankster, import-export salesman, patron of border bordellos, arrogant adventurer from Dixie with ties to Mexico - I find this output among the most intriguing and original bodies of visual art to be seen in the U.S. David Thomas Roberts
writer, painter, composer
