It is a rare person who truly looks into a work of art created by the American artist, Grace Baggot. Grace's art is an invitation to a playful world, but it is not background music.

Her art is a spirited circus full of painterly tightrope walking and rigorous mental gymnastics, of visual toys and equations. This is work that adheres to subtle rules that tease and challenge the eye and mind, rules that can't quite be identified, that constitute a fiercely intelligent order of light, line, form and color.

By the time that you ask the question, "Hey, does this thing really work?" (a question one should ask about all true art) you are already embarked on a pathway of delicate inspiration. You are already on the ride. Some of these works are simply gorgeous gem like ideas. Others are cathedrals of human spirit. This is an artistic world enchanted with the white magic of light. Created to inspire.

A juggler might drop the ball, a gymnast might stumble, a tightrope walker might fall. Grace too, at great risk, requires of herself a high level of technical precision. This art does not have the hard and inevitable perfection of a computer generated line. Rather, this is the softer, organic perfection of the Sumi brush stroke that depends on the sweep of the arm, on posture, on breath control and on the tranquil heart.

There is sense and strength here that derives from the integration of form, a strength that expresses with the radiance of symbolic thought. Here, despite the complexity, the observer's esthetic reward is a prize that satisfies with a purity that is simple. These are modern symbols that derive their power and authority from Grace's ancient sources of inspiration: Iconography, Christian and pre-Christian art; Celtic artifacts; Manuscript Illumination and Geometry.

But one must not overlook the fact that this is post modern art. This is real contemporary expression that celebrates and dignifies life as the artist lives it today.

Grace Baggot, a native New Yorker, now lives both in a Rhode Island fishing village and on a farm by the Mediterranean Sea at the foot of the mountains in the south of Italy. She dwells in Italy within a stubbornly matriarchal, agrarian culture. It is formed of seasons for planting, growing and harvesting. It's focus is on creating and the joy of nurturing, on the strengths of home and family and friendship. This milieu expresses itself in festivals, birthdays and Saint's Days, in growth and maturation, in death and rebirth. Grace's symbols, her ideas and cathedrals are about the sublime within the simple acts of living.

She makes her paintings late at night, her materials laid out like a Japanese tea service on a low table. She sits on the floor before the fireplace.

Her work celebrates nurturing as the method of hope and joyful progress. Grace is a woman fully, consciously and precisely celebrating these particular elements of existence.

The curve and flow of Grace's oeuvre is the interior calligraphy of the explicitly female psyche. With her private mythology she is declaring with a new poetry the ancient, indomitable, and eternal feminine.

Thomas W. Frank                                     August 2004

Cavaliere
Vico XII Foundation, d.RA
Roscigno, Italy