Blackpool art prodigy channels tough experiences to bring captivating debut exhibition to life
Charley Baines has wowed teachers and artists across the country - and her debut exhibition opens in Blackpool this week
An art prodigy who saw off 21,500 rivals to have her work - an emotional portrait of her father - displayed in London’s Royal Academy of Arts will open her debut exhibition in Blackpool tomorrow (21 November).
Charley Baines, 18, picked up her brushes to cope with some tough “memories and experiences”, and has since wowed her teachers and artists in her adopted hometown.
She said: “I found fine art during that time and I thought, ‘I could put something together here’. It was the manifest of everything. It was not just me I was representing, it was other people that could gather something from it too.”
Charley, who lives in Bispham with her mother Katy Grewcock, a social work practitioner at the University of Central Lancashire, and step-father Mick Grewcock, a well-known local property owner, went to primary school near Preston.
After being awarded a bursary and scholarship to learn at AKS Lytham, she studied fine art, graphic design and English literature at Blackpool Sixth Form, earning grades of A*, A and B respectively.
She is having a gap year but has applied to study physics at university next year - and sees an “intersectionality” between the science and art that she finds “particularly inspiring”.
Talking to The Blackpool Lead about her work, Charley, who lived as a transgender boy called Chandler from the ages of 14 to 17, said she has “always maintained some sketchbooks” but did not take art seriously until around a year ago.
“I wasn’t doing very well in school at the time and it felt like the only thing that made sense,” she said.
“The internet opened my eyes when I was younger to an array of content in forms of arts I could express. It wasn’t until sixth form when I started to learn more about art within general society, not just the niche corners of the internet.”
Charley made headlines this summer when a portrait of her father, Dark Beauty, John Paul Baines, was picked to be displayed in the capital as part of the Royal Academy’s young artists’ summer show.
“To a person outside of art, it’s definitely a painting,” Charley told The Blackpool Lead.
“Within fine art, I’d call it contemporary. It’s not a trailblazer by any means but it stands out amongst other paintings because it’s a beaten down guy on his low.”
Charley said she had the portrait of her father, who she described as “funny and intelligent”, framed so he can have it on his mantelpiece so he can “look at it and hopefully reflect”.
She said: “The lights in (his) house are really yellow - a tungsten colour - and even though the house was really dysfunctional and my life was really dysfunctional, there was this everlasting sense of me being loved.”
Charley’s latest work includes paintings of residents at a care home where she worked and of her brother Louis Baines, 20, a student at Blackpool and The Fylde College.
“Painting is really for the people,” Charley said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s huge and established. What I mean is we obviously live in a society that is still based on a class structure and a gender structure. I find that painting, rather than being something for an aristocratic class to have in their nice country homes, it’s now something that is more in uncensorable language that we can truly understand the depth of.”
“I just try and pick the things that I think are important to our contemporary society and I hope it makes people feel seen or they can get something out of it.”
And what does the future hold for Charley ahead of her possible university course in September?
She said: “Because I’ve changed so much I have (a dream) but I have never told anyone: I’m really inspired by things in tech that are happening right now. To be a part of the revolution that is going to come and to do something to help play a part in that would be the most amazing thing.
“I’m working to create AI that helps to connect artists to commerciality and business. That’s the summary of it, essentially. We can use (AI) for good if we want to.”
Charley landed the exhibition, called Please Believe Me, at HiveArts and Hive Urban Farm Shop in Church Street in the town centre almost by chance.
She said: “It was a hot summer’s day and I was like, ‘What am I doing with my life?’
“I wrote this piece up and walked into Hive. I saw two of the founders - Dawn (Mander) and Ian (Currie) talking. I said, ‘Can I just say something to the people that run this?’ I was waxing lyrical about my art.
“I pulled out these prints and they said, ‘Wow, this is good!’
“One thing I hope is that I will have a list of clients that will help me survive this financial year so I can study. But more than that it’s that the whole community will be amazing.
“I’m excited, too. It’s good for Hive and Blackpool. I feel like a lot of people in Blackpool don’t see the hope in it.”
Charley began posting flyers for the exhibition, which launches at 6pm tomorrow and runs until January 4, but said she found herself in trouble with the authorities.
She said: “I had put up posters very enthusiastically all over the Fylde coast for this exhibition; about 60, I think, from Lytham to Poulton to Cleveleys, everywhere. I thought I was doing something that would be OK and benefit the area in ways too.
“However, I had my negligence to the local authorities’ rules proved otherwise - I had actually committed a huge crime, a £10,000 crime, for placing my posters everywhere… on top of last summer’s Circus Mondao, electrical boxes.
“I had 48 hours to get them all down or else it would have been £150 for each - a year of uni.
“So I did, however not as enthusiastically as I had put them up. I had walked and bussed everywhere, too.
“It was stupid in hindsight to think it would be OK and I apologised to Hive - and everyone else supporting me mentioned on the posters - for making the mistake 60 times.
“I got all the posters down and I am now going straight and avoiding a life of crime by asking shopkeepers, cafes and placing them on community boards instead!”
Dawn Mander, HiveArts co-founder and curator, said Charley’s work “evokes the brilliance of greats like Paula Rego, Jenny Saville and Lucian Fraud” and is “truly captivating and thought-provoking”.