The Artist

 

As a young musician, E. Laurence Bake touched the edges of fame and saw clearly what it cost.  The industry that surrounds art, he understood, does not always serve the artist.  The machine is designed to serve itself.  So he made a decision that would define the rest of his life: he walked away from it.

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What followed were fifty years of creation in deliberate solitude. Not isolation born of circumstance, but chosen privacy.   The kind that allows a person to go very deep into a single question without the interruption of markets, critics, or the need to be seen.  He did not exhibit.  He did not submit. He created.

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He did not make art to be discovered.

He made art because there was no other honest choice.

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What emerged from those fifty years is something that did not exist before: the Painted Poem.  A new art form of poetry, geometric visual structure, and sound unified into a single, indivisible experience.  Not three elements assembled on a surface, but one object with three dimensions.  You cannot read it without seeing it.  You cannot see it without, in some sense, hearing it.

 

The body of work he has created: the collections, the canvases, the poetry, the music is now, for the first time, available to be encountered.  Not because he changed his mind about the world.  Because the work is ready for the next generations.