Art on the half shell - how artist C. Thomas Baylock began his career drawing on a pistachio shell

American Visions, June-July, 1994 by Melanie Payne

The day C. Thomas Baylock became "The Pistachio Man" started with a routine father-and-son trip to the pediatrician. The office was filled with children, the doctor was running late, and everyone's patience was running out. Baylock, looking for something to entertain the kids, reached into his pocket and found some pistachio nut shells. He took one out and said to his son, "I bet I can draw your face on this shell." With a fine-tip marker, Baylock did just that. Soon, he was drawing a likeness of everyone in the office children, their parents and even the staff--onto pistachio shells.

When he returned home that evening, he started pasting the shell faces on watercolor bodies. From this unlikely start, Baylock's pistachio shell creations have found their way into the hands of collectors who appreciate the humor and talent of this 49-year-old artist.

"They enable you to laugh and recall your roots at the same time," says talk show host Bertice Berry. "On the wall in my office is a piece called |Surrounded by Nuts.' It has a mirror in the center with nuts all around--they are my family, co-workers and friends. So while I'm reminded that I am surrounded by nuts, at the same time I am forced to remember that the biggest nut in the center is me."

Baylock began drawing while stationed in Vietnam during the late 1960s as a clerk typist in the Army's psychological warfare unit. With the encouragement of the unit's two artists, who believed he "had an eye," Baylock found a store in Vietnam that sold pastels and started doing portraits of the soldiers in his unit. After Vietnam, he pursued a banking career in Indianapolis, but also took classes in drawing and watercolors.

His skills were in such demand at Indiana National Bank, where he worked as an operations manager, that the vice president of operations sent out a memo stating, "Thomas Baylock was not hired to be an artist for the department."

An untimely layoff from a Cleveland bank in 1988 forced Baylock to re-evaluate his situation and make a radical career shift: "Art. That's what I wanted to do. it seems obvious now, but it was a revelation then, like something was lifted off me. I knew what direction I was going to follow for the rest of my life."

With his unemployment check, severance pay and his working spouse, Patricia, to provide financial support, Baylock began to establish himself as an artist. His creative process frequently takes him in interesting directions. "I was drawing a ball of string," he says, "thinking about how each piece casts a shadow on the piece below, and I thought about people. I wanted to show how people interconnect in the same way." Using a technique known as pointillism, Baylock draws portraits, as well as intertwining human figures that often produce disturbing images.

A friend, photographer Jimmy Gayle, saw his work and introduced Baylock to Malcolm Brown, a noted Cleveland-area artist and gallery owner. Brown urged Baylock to enter the Cain Park Arts Festival, a world-renowned juried art show held in Cleveland Heights. The annual festival usually receives more than 800 entries for 150 spots, but Baylock figured he had nothing to lose by applying. "People said, |Man you'll never get into Cain Park. You're not an artist, you never showed anywhere.' But it was the first show I got accepted in," he recalls.

Baylock expected his work in pointillism to attract attention, but at Cain Park the pistachio art was the big hit, especially with youngsters. Recognizing its effects, he has since used it to help children develop skills in artistic expression. He has worked as an artist-in-residence at local elementary schools, he gives demonstrations at libraries, and he has worked with former gang members at a juvenile detention facility in Columbus, Ohio.

Critics, too, are recognizing Baylock's work. His awards include the "Best of the Show" at Cleveland's Square to Square Festival, the "Best of the Show" in the crafts division at the Clifton Arts Festival, and first-place prize for graphics at the Cape May (New Jersey) Fine Arts Festival. Even Steven Litt, an art critic for the Cleveland Plain Dealer whom Baylock describes as "a feared man in this town," has had good words to say about Baylock's pistachio art. It has "the engaging intensity of outsider folk art," Litt remarks.

Baylock's explanation of how he brings that unique quality to every drawing is simple: "There is a shell for everybody's face. And all the shells are slightly different. That's the irony of it all. There's a real similarity between people and nuts."

Nuts About Art

In 1990, C. Thomas Baylock and two other black Cleveland-area artists, Richmond Holton and Debbie Hill, rented gallery space and opened Studio 26 at 530 Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, (216) 771-NUTS. The studio has become popular for people wanting to pick up a single pistachio figure on a birthday card or a major piece with thousands of shells. With prices ranging from $2 to $2,000, Baylock's original art fits any budget.