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!