David Baze

Art Brokerage: David Baze American Artist: b. 1947-1998. David Baze work has been shown regularly in San Diego for five years, continues to vary and develop his themes while maintaining a consistently powerful painting style. His sense of color, light and their definition of the human form can be mesmerizing, so fluid is his brush. Though there are a few surprisingly awkward moments in the current show, where paint gets muddled and the gestural sparseness bogged down by detail, Baze's work is as rich as ever. As always in Baze's work, coherence of body and mind seems to belong only to women. Baze painted numerous images of women in water. While they meshed marvelously with the fluid rhythms of the sea, the men around them stood or floated clumsily, dressed in business suits. Here, Baze continues to glorify women, especially nudes, bestowing upon them leonine grace, intense sexuality as well as a strong sense of integrity. The artist himself is the only other character in these filmic splices who shows a sense of secure self-possession. So secure is Baze, in fact, that he can laugh about the way his balding head rhymes with the shape and glowing surface of a lemon ("Self-Portrait With Lemon"). And in "Finger Painter," he plays again with self-reflexive humor, using his fingers to paint an image of himself finger painting. These visual double-entendres help round out a show that abounds with edgy, sexy, mysterious and lonely moments. Listings wanted.