self portrait Photograph

Johnny Andrew Gigliotti Bailik was born in the same steel town as the late Andy Warhol; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He studied privately at the Hoyt Institute of Fine Arts and attended the Nationally Accredited Bliss Hall School of Fine and Performing Arts. Bailik also helped to organize a regionally legendary show entitled "Spectacle", a multi-media, collaborative, outdoor performance that contained everything from static art to interactive sculpture to extravagant performance art. Bailik's travels and life as an artist has also made it possible for him to meet such artists as Paul Jenkins, Dennis Oppenheim, Julian Schnabel, Ed Moses, Mark DiSuvero, Dennis Hopper, and Robert Rauschenberg to name a few, as well as to work with artists of varying degrees and aesthetics. Bailik's work is been primarily painting, but has also included sculpture, video, and installations. It has been displayed internationally in contemporary and modern museums, commercial galleries, and private collections. He has also won awards and grants in multi-media, video installation, and painting. Bailik moved to Los Angeles, California in 2000. He states, "I have been profoundly affected by the 'City of Angels'. The energy, spirituality, diversity, the eclecticism of the culture and the land has altered my work dramatically. It is a beautiful time and place to explore." Johnny Bailik continues to live and work in his Los Angeles, CA studio. Beauty is for the artist something outside all orders of rank, because in beauty opposites are tamed; the highest sign of power, namely power over opposites; moreover, without tension: - that violence is no longer needed; that everything follows, obeys, so easily and so pleasantly that is what delights the artists will to power. Nietzsche, The Will To Power Aesthetic - The process of painting for me is about transcendence, and the painting itself is the medium between us and the realm of Beauty. This process, physically and stylistically for me is a spontaneous, trance induced, gestured, and energized dance. It is ceremonial. There is a reciprocity, a symbiotic relationship that happens between you and the piece. You initiate the creation of the painting, you give to it birth, then it is as if you feed off of it, it helps to guide you, a give and take happens. But I believe to have an immaculate and strong painting; it has to have a history. It has to have a birth/death/rebirth.