Stuart Baxter was born in 1947 and grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.  His undergraduate studies in fine arts were at Philadelphia College of Art (’64-’68) – majoring in painting.  And painting has remained his ongoing, core activity for over 30 years.

Baxter spent most of the 1970s in Provincetown, Massachusetts.   He met William Seeley there in 1970; and they have been together since then.

In 1978, Baxter moved to Boston where he pursued graduate studies at Massachusetts College of Art (’78-’80) and at Boston University (’80-’82).

Historical influences on Baxter’s development as an artist are diverse – including the oeuvres of Pietro Longhi and Jean-Antoine Watteau; and – closer to home – Yves Klein, Marcel Broodthaers and Jasper Johns.

In addition, architectural structures have often profoundly influenced Baxter’s visual experience. He has been as equally intrigued by “exotic” historical edifices such as the Alhambra and the Taj Mahal as he has been by newer structures such as Le Corbusier’s Notre Dame du Haut Chapel at Ronchamp and Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers in Los Angeles – all of which he “discovered” in his youth through photos in books.

Later, as an adult, Baxter went to the source to see the architecture he admired – traveling to Barcelona, Seville, Venice, Ravenna, Istanbul and elsewhere. Many of these structures included mosaic as a major design-element. And so these travels slowly fueled his growing interest in mosaic as an art-medium. But, finally, it was the mosaic sculptures of Niki de Saint-Phalle that provided seminal inspiration for Baxter.

It was only after Baxter and Seeley had settled at Tirtagangga, Bali, in 1990 – in a culture without any tradition of mosaic – that Baxter first began working with broken ceramic tiles. His mosaic-studio began operation in 1991 and he has completed an extensive body of work since then.

Baxter is a classicist working within the traditional and low-tech mediums of oil-painting and ceramic-mosaic. He takes simple characteristics such as texture in painting and fragmentation in mosaic to their ultimate ends.