WHO’S WHO

Local Personalities: Mike J. Baird (MJB)

by Dr. Iain Corness

The heading for this section of the Pattaya Mail is “Local Personality”, and this week’s profile is on a man who really is a local and really is a personality. Mike J. Baird is often seen walking through the streets of Pattaya with a beatific smile on his face, a straw hat perched jauntily on his head, a small pony tail poking out underneath and the fashionable number three cut greying stubble. Mike is an artist.

Many may of course just dismiss Mike as yet another farang who has come here to retire, and reinvent himself, like a Walter Mitty, as the character of his fanciful dreams. This is only very partially true. Mike has indeed retired here, but he has certainly not reinvented himself. He was always like this, and I have seen the photographs to prove it. Mind you, Mike is not the sort of man who wants (or needs) to prove anything. He is happy just as he is - being MJB.

He was born in London, and describes himself as having been “born in turps” as his father was a spray painter. Scholastic achievements were modest, but he showed that he had a flair for art, topping the class in this subject. Art class was not enough to keep him in school, however, and he left just before he turned 16, going to work for a car upholstery firm. Stitching animal hides was not his future and he showed some drawings he had done to an outdoor advertising company and he was hired.

He joined the artists working in the company. “I had no GCE’s like all the other artists there. One guy was even famous,” he said. Mike’s job was to clean perspex, fill in the outlines (like a giant painting by numbers) and other menial jobs. However, he could try his hand at his own artistic pursuits during slack times.

These personal art endeavours began with laboriously painstaking black and white scraperboard work, and then into oils. This change of medium was initially time based. “Someone wanted one of my scraperboard pictures, but done in oils. I did it and found that Jeez it was a lot quicker and I thought why don’t I do them all in oils!” He had also begun copying famous artists and their styles. He explained this by saying, “I was a natural born copyist, I never had much of an imagination.”

He used to carry his art in a small artist’s case, but before too long, the art would not fit in the case. Not that he had too many - the art was too large! He had a sign on his car, “I do Murals” and by the time he was 19 years old, by then sporting a very luxurious beard, he was doing 96 square foot paintings such as “The Triumph of Venus” by Boucher.

During the day, however, he was still painting enormous advertising hoardings, but he was then sent to Spain to study new techniques that the Spanish had introduced, and bring them back to the UK. This involved spray painting with inks, rather than paint. This was a breakthrough, with the inks drying in seconds, speeding up production. “I could bash out a 200 square foot billboard in two days,” said Mike proudly.

His speed and faithful reproduction were such that he needed to branch out on his own, which he did, forming his own outdoor advertising company. His fame grew, his workload grew and the size of his billboards grew - to a staggering 900 square feet. The downside to all this was an overexposure to the solvents used to carry the ink pigments and he had to quit the industry to preserve his health.

Like us all, he still needed to work, and art was his life, so he began doing portraits in oils from his small home studio and then selling them in the famous Bayswater Road in London, sitting there with three to four hundred other artists. Some of the greatest compliments he received were from people of whose deceased relatives he had done a likeness in oils. “They would come and thank me for bringing them back (to life).”

His holidays from the canvas and the oils were in the mystic East. “I had always wanted to go to Japan and this holiday come up in Thailand and I thought, Thailand? That’s near Japan!” Despite the poor grasp of geography, he came out to Thailand 22 years ago and loved it and forgot about Japan. He returned enough times to know that this was where he wanted to retire, and 12 years ago he put his brushes aside and arrived. The retired copy artist retired to Pattaya, the ‘home’ of copy artists, with nests of them every three or four doors in South Pattaya.

But Mike did not drag out his easel, magnifying glass and stool and join them - he was here to retire. So you will not see Mike sitting in a little hole in the wall, squinting at a faded photograph. His talents are still called upon though. He is retained by some overseas galleries as an advisor as to the faithfulness of some copy art to the original. Despite being well retired and content, he is still very active and has designed a Pattaya entertainment guide, with 100 different things to do around Pattaya and hopes that someone will publish this for him. His other hobby is his cartooning which he took up three years ago, which he calls his “charity” work, as they are donated “to help feed a few kids at the orphanage.”

The final word from Mike Baird, on being a copy artist, “People always look down on copyists, but the bottom line was I enjoyed painting and I enjoyed copying. There are trillions of original artists out there, but they can’t sell their stuff. I sold my pictures for 40 years!” And made enough money to retire out here as well!