Beezy Bailey’s ‘Bring on the Dancing Trees’ exhibition explores love, joy and truth - TimesLIVE

Making marks is an instinct. We start young. We’re encouraged to paint when we’re little. Then it all falls apart. We abandon attempts to communicate pictorially. We decide that we lack talent. But successful artist Beezy Bailey didn’t go through that process. He kept going.

Now, with over four decades of mark-making behind him, Beezy is able to narrate globally in his own endlessly flexible visual language. His dual British and South African nationalities, combined with this ‘art passport’, have gotten Beezy everywhere. He’s had past collaborations with musicians David Bowie, Dave Matthews and Brian Eno, and his work, both pictorial and sculptural, has graced gardens, homes, museums, landscapes and hotels in South Africa, London, Kenya, Rome, Florence and Umbria.

“I’m a conduit, something flows through me, a kind of dreaming that’s still there when you wake up.”

For his latest exhibition, he’s combined efforts with the Everard Read gallery to deliver his solo exhibition, Bring on the Dancing Trees. With this show, Bailey’s audience gets to garner a sense of his profound love of the world, nature and humanity as well as express his concerns for the dark path we seem to be on.

Bailey’s artwork demonstrates an exuberant ‘return to truth’ – the artist’s use of painterly post-impressionism, fauvism, informalism, and abstraction places his practice in today’s metamodernism.

'Lovers in the flowers'. (Supplied) Anything is grist to Beezy’s artistic mill — crowns, horses, fables, ships, birds, fairy tales, masks, wild dogs, dragonflies as well as his vibrant “Anthropocene’ meditations.

As an artist and performer, if 2026 were the 1960s, he may well have been a Fluxus performance artist, or if it were the 1920s, he’d be part of the Dada movement (painting with a necktie in public), or if in the Middle Ages, as the court jester in a castle. The artist has always been perfectly at home in a disrupting role.

Bring on the Dancing Trees allows us to “focus on the quieter, more profound bits that lurk in the underbelly of his paintings, the bits that feel like a Gabriel García Márquez novel lampooning excess and authoritarianism while quietly bejewelling the simple heady joy of being in the world, of being in love, of dancing in defiance,” says Charles Shields, Bailey’s gallerist.

Bailey is an artist who’s bridged the gulf between the provincial and the international without losing a sense of identity or an appetite for invention. He accomplishes this, in part, by reinterpreting memory and placing it in a new context that becomes relevant to our harried times, reminding us to slow down and smell the flowers. As he likes to point out: “I’m a conduit, something flows through me, a kind of dreaming that’s still there when you wake up.”

'Let me take you down cause I'm going to' (left) and 'Purple Images' (right). (Supplied) About his vibrant ‘Anthropocene’ meditations, Bailey elaborates: “We live in very dark and evil times. But, I believe that fear is the greatest evil and the ultimate cause of war. I avoid doing illustrations of anything purposefully propagandist in my art making. Instead, I try to assimilate negativity into positivity as a form of creative alchemy. When I’m crafting art, I think of myself as a miner of light in the dark cave of the world. Apart from issues of human displacement and war, another engine of the art I make comes from a deep concern that the Earth I grew up on no longer exists. The fish and birds and insects are going, going ... gone! The fight against Orwellian mediocrity, spawned in part by AI brain rot, is real and happening now. So, I destroy the unsatisfactory paintings and sculptures, re-painting and re-carving them until they work for me. I work until they shine, I hope, like lights on black velvet, or dance like stars in an endless night of love.”

On abstraction Bailey has this to say: “With the majority of the paintings on show, I find myself scrutinising them as one might, after waking, analyse a dream. But for the first time ever I’ve included paintings in this exhibition which I decided to keep in their more abstract phase. I’ve increasingly realised that it isn’t always necessary to push them into a figurative narrative, just because that’s what I usually do. With this shift, I intend to allow the viewer to imagine their own stories, and to dream.”

Acquiring a personal vision is a lengthy process. A lot of assimilating and digesting goes on before an artist starts seeing with their own mind’s eye. Some elements and symbols Bailey has always played with include high heels, cats, crowns and celestial skies. In Bailey’s lexicon, high heels symbolise being human, which makes us either smart enough to have designed them or stupid enough to wear them, I can’t decide which.

Bailey’s best work is created slowly in solitude, with self-reflection in the studio, but he’s enormously adaptable, and able to create on the go in a museum, al fresco, sometimes naked, but always wearing a Panama hat and shoes; Moroccan babouche slippers, Gucci loafers or Birkenstocks — his slip-on shoe collection deserves an article of its own.

Bailey elucidates: “I call my art-making process ‘dream reality’ because, unless it’s a landscape or a portrait, I do my work without a pre-concept. I start by making rough marks, often using canvases as ‘paint brushes’ by dragging them, wet paint dripping, against each other. This makes abstract marks similar to what one sees on the stained walls which Antoni Tàpies based his painting approach on.”

Asked to comment about his sculptures, Bailey said: “As with releasing the dancing figures seen in the abstract marks of my paintings, it was natural for me to discover in the pieces of wood that I carved with my chainsaw ‘dancing limbs’ to be put together [and] then cast into bronze. A great influence on these pieces is my late mentor, the Venda artist Nelson Mukhuba. He taught me to reveal the shapes of mythical beings — humans and animals — in the branches of a tree.”

Accepting unashamedly that he can be, as we all are, party to unconscious plagiarism, Bailey enthuses: “I’m delighted to debut new sculptures of dancing figures, inspired by Matisse’s painted dancers, intended (like the great Impressionist) to capture the joys of life, of unity and happiness. Dancing is a very cathartic process. With reference to the Marc Bolan lyrics ‘I danced myself out of the womb’ — I’ve carried on dancing ever since — often in my studio while I paint.”

'Happyness' (left) and 'La Ciudad De Los Angeles' (right). (Supplied) Bailey dances in the studio while he paints, dances with his own sculptures at the foundry, dances in castles when he can or at the farmer’s market early in the morning. His dance style can be best described as a gumboot dance/ballet/jig/‘Jim shuffle’ (an evocation of his late dad, Jim Bailey, the publisher of Drum magazine).

“I’ve often been asked to explain my spontaneous dancing at Oranjezicht City Farm Market in Cape Town, especially to English people who, unlike South Africans, tend to view it as ‘mad, embarrassing or hilariously funny’. I think singer Thom Yorke of Radiohead sums it up perfectly with the lyrics of his song [Present Tense]: ‘This dance is like a weapon of self defence against the present, against the present tense’.” (Watch the artist dance on his Instagram profile @beezybailey).