Art on the half shell - how artist C. Thomas Baylock began his career drawing on a pistachio shell

The day C Thomas Baylock became "The Pistachio Man" started with a routine father-and-son trip to the pediatrician. The office was filled with children, the doctor was running late, and everyone's patience was running on the outside Baylock, looking for something to entertain the kids, reached into his pouch and found some pistachio nut shells. He took single out and said to his son "I bet I can draw your face upon this shell." With a fine-tip marker, Baylock did just that. pretty soon he was drawing a likeness of everyone in the office children, their parents and flat the staff--onto pistachio shells.

When he turn backed home that evening, he started pasting the shell faces upon watercolor bodies. From this unlikely start, Baylock's pistachio shell creations have ground their way into the hands of collectors who appreciate the humor and talent of this 49-year-old artist.

"They enable you to laugh and recall your bases at the same time," says talk present to view host Bertice Berry. "On the wall in my office is a piece called |Surround by dint of Nuts.' It has a mirror in the center with nut all around--they are my family, co-workers and friends. with equal reason while I'm reminded that I am encloseed by nuts, at the same time I am forced to remember that the biggest nut in the center is me"

Baylock began drawing while stationed in Vietnam during the late 1960 as a recorder typist in the Army's psychological warfare unit. With the encouragement of the unit's sum of two units artists, who believed he "had an eye" Baylock lay the foundation of a store in Vietnam that sold pastels and started doing portraits of the soldiers in his unit. After Vietnam, he pursu a banking career in Indianapolis, on the other hand also took classes in drawing and watercolors.

His skills were in like demand at Indiana National Bank, where he worked as an operations manager, that the vice president of operations sent on the outside a memo stating, "Thomas Baylock was not hired to be an artist for the department."

An untimely layoff from a Cleveland bank in 1988 forced Baylock to re-evaluate his situation and make a radical career shift: "Art. That's what I wanted to do. it appears obvious now, but it was a revelation then, like something was lifted not on me. I knew what direction I was going to go in the rear [i]or[/i] in the wake of for the rest of my life."

With his unemployment check, severance pay and his working spouse, Patricia, to provide financial support, Baylock began to establish himself as an artist. His creative proces not seldom takes him in interesting directions. "I was drawing a ball of string," he says, "thinking about by what means each piece casts a shadow upon the piece below, and I contemplation about people. I wanted to exhibit how people interconnect in the same way." Using a technique known as pointillism, Baylock draws portraits, as well as intertwining human figures that oftentimes produce disturbing images.

A friend, photographer Jimmy Gayle, saw his work and introduced Baylock to Malcolm Brown a noted Cleveland-area artist and gallery holder Brown urged Baylock to come into the Cain Park Arts Festival, a world-renowned juried art present to view held in Cleveland Heights. The annual festival usually receives more than 800 entries for 150 speckles but Baylock figured he had nothing to let slip by applying. "People said, |Man you'll at no time get into Cain Park. You're not an artist, you not at any time showed anywhere.' But it was the first display I got accepted in," he recalls.

Baylock wait fored his work in pointillism to attract attention, on the contrary at Cain Park the pistachio art was the big hit, especially with youngsters. Recognizing its consequences he has since used it to help children evolve skills in artistic expression. He has worked as an artist-in-residence at local elementary institutes he gives demonstrations at libraries, and he has worked with former gang members at a juvenile detention facility in Columbus, Ohio.

Critics, too, are recognizing Baylock's work. His awards include the "Best of the Show" at Cleveland's Square to Square Festival, the "Best of the Show" in the crafts division at the Clifton Arts Festival, and first-place prize for graphics at the Cape May (New Jersey) Fine Arts Festival. flat Steven Litt, an art critic for the Cleveland Plain Dealer whom Baylock describes as "a feared man in this town," has had serviceable words to say about Baylock's pistachio art. It has "the engaging intensity of outsider folk art," Litt remarks.

Baylock's explanation of in what way he brings that unique quality to each drawing is simple: "There is a shell for everybody's face. And all the shells are slightly different. That's the irony of it all. There's a real similarity between race and nuts."

Nut About Art

In 1990 C Thomas Baylock and sum of two units other black Cleveland-area artists, Richmond Holton and Debbie Hill, openinged gallery space and opened Studio 26 at 530 Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, (216) 771-NUT The studio has become popular for clan wanting to pick up a single pistachio figure upon a birthday card or a major piece with thousands of shells. With prices ranging from $2 to $2000 Baylock's original art fits any budget

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