The Art of Sushi and Sake
Baden Art

By Nancy Uyemura

On any given day you might see Stan Baden walking his dog around Little Tokyo and the Artist’s District in downtown Los Angeles. A tall, quiet kind of guy with a wry sense of humor, he is an artist, a master printer, professor of art and a great salmon fisherman. (The later could be what fosters his love of sushi and sake or it could be his wife Aiko, who is also a printmaker and flight attendant for United Airlines.)

Stanley has been creating works of art with a slightly offbeat sensibility for many decades. Some crudely humorous, others darkly honest that make you either cringe or cry. At first blush you may not ‘get’ the picture either and it takes a second or third glance to notice that there is something wrong with the scene. Then, with a simple explanation you suddenly just ‘get’ where the artist’s mind is coming from and what he wants you, the viewer to see. In almost all of Baden’s work there is something going wrong in the picture. I think it must have been Stanley that coined that phrase ‘what’s wrong with this picture?’ Growing up in the country made deep impressions on his psyche and his relationship and observation of nature and animals. This love of nature and animals show up in his imagery even today. His figurative work depicts scenes of animals or humans in some sort of everyday event that is honest and sometimes painful or embarrassing to watch. But it is done in such a natural and nonchalant manner that it is not judgmental in any sort of way but is relegated to a survival of the fittest, ‘that’s just how it is’ way.

In the most current series of prints that he is working on Stanley has created work that represents the awkwardness of a foreigner in a foreign land (more specifically the white guy in a sea of yellow faces). The foreigner, here, being an oversized American in the foreign land of Asia and the faux pas that are being committed consciously or unconsciously, and sometimes a little grossly exaggerated. He is on sabbatical this year from his teaching job and has done some images from a recent trip to China. The work brings out the obvious awkwardness of a tall, blue-eyed American from Kansas in a world filled with millions of small, dark-eyed Chinese who may have never seen a Caucasian before. It’s about consciousness, self-consciousness, fear and paranoia of things seen and unseen. The work is about all of us and how we feel and relate to one another. It rings true to human nature and that is where Baden’s work connects with everyone and he gets a reaction. And that is the main ingredient of a work of art, it causes one to feel, think, to react to what is being presented.

Stanley has been teaching printmaking for over 12 years now and before that worked as a master printer at Gemini GEL here in Los Angeles, one of the preeminent print presses in the country. While he has a long history of printmaking, his own work dates back to his childhood in Independence, Kansas and art was always something that Stanley was going to do ever since grade school. He received his bachelor’s degree in painting and drawing at Columbia College in Missouri, and his master’s of fine arts degree in painting from Otis Art Institute of the Parsons School of Design in Los Angeles. He worked mostly in printmaking from 1985 to 1995 (though teaching occasionally during this time) and since then has become more involved with education. He has taught at universities and colleges in Texas and Alaska and now, primarily teaches here in Los Angeles. Stanley has shown his work in galleries and museums in the United States as well as in Japan.

Stan has spent a great deal of his professional life helping other artists promote and develop their work and his own work has always taken a back seat to theirs. He good naturedly jokes about his anonymity as an artist to many of the people he works with, and he has worked with many, famous as well as a few not so famous artists. He loves collaborative printmaking but is appreciative of any interest in his own work.

Currently Stanley is fishing in Alaska, but also working on a print specifically for Sushi and Sake and we look forward to its release this fall. The print has that special quality of a Baden original, somewhat minimal in execution but maximal in sensual reverberations. The simplicity of some of the images might mask the complexity of the issues that he asks viewers to consider, but in many cases that simplicity lends the viewers clarity of vision in decoding the images and discovering the issues. Though Baden has not studied psychology his work consists of observations of human nature and therefore has a psychological angle to it. We look forward to seeing what Stanley’s take is on his ‘Sushi and Sake’ bar scene, as well as how much salmon he brings back from his trip to Alaska. Look for Stan and his dog walking down Traction Avenue and look for his work to be shown locally. It will make you smile and pierce your heart.