E.C. Baugh (Eric Casey Baugh. b. 1984, Georgia, U.S.)

E.C. Baugh is an American painter whose recent work marks a deliberate departure from classical realism and a movement toward contemporary expressionism rooted in emotional, ancestral, and elemental forces. Formerly recognized as Casey Baugh, he spent over three decades refining a realist practice that earned him international recognition for his atmospheric portraits and cinematic use of light. In recent years, however, Baugh has undergone a profound transformation, both artistic and personal, culminating in the adoption of his full name Eric Casey Baugh, using the initials E.C. Baugh and a radical shift in his visual language.

Born in the Appalachian Mountains of Georgia, Baugh’s early environment was one of natural beauty, spiritual silence, and generational storytelling. He began painting as a child and studied realism under the legendary realist painter Richard Schmid, whose mentorship grounded him in classical technique and discipline. His earliest work was defined by technical excellence, psychological subtlety, and the quiet intensity of rendered human presence. Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, Baugh’s work was widely recognized for its evocative handling of light and atmosphere, often blurring the line between figuration and narrative. In 2016, following his fourth successful solo show in New York City, Baugh’s work broke his personal sales record when a major painting, “Window with a View”, sold in the six figures to a prominent private collector. His paintings have been exhibited in leading galleries and institutions and featured in five solo exhibitions in New York City and Los Angeles. His works are held in private and corporate collections internationally.

In recent years, Baugh underwent a significant aesthetic and conceptual shift. This shift was catalyzed by a deep personal reconnection with his Native American heritage, which reframed his understanding of identity, spirit, and artistic purpose. This rediscovery of lineage, identity, and spiritual resonance marked a departure from his realist foundation and initiated an intentional release of control in his practice. Embracing gesture, intuition, and vulnerability as central modes of expression, Baugh formally transitioned to the name E.C. Baugh, signaling the emergence of a new creative language and a redefined artistic identity.

His recent work engages in what he describes as an “excavation”, digging beneath surface appearances to reveal interior states, ancestral memory, and collective human vulnerability. Baugh’s current practice emerges from a process of unlearning, letting go of control in favor of intuition, and releasing the impulse to depict how people look in order to explore how they feel.

As E.C. Baugh, the artist has embraced a visual vocabulary grounded in expressionism and material sensitivity. His paintings utilize natural textures, layered pigment, and a palette informed by “ancient colors”, earth tones, mineral reds, ash blacks, ochres, and deep indigos, colors that evoke ritual, earth, and time. Figures in this new body of work appear fractured, dissolving, or emerging; they are often fused with environmental forms and painted with gestural immediacy rather than anatomical accuracy. The result is a body of work that resists traditional representation in favor of embodied emotion and spiritual resonance.

Baugh’s current practice can be understood as both a continuation and a deconstruction of his earlier realism. Where his past work sought to preserve the visible, his current work seeks to reveal the invisible. The canvas becomes not a window, but a mirror; one that reflects the primal, intuitive, and often hidden aspects of the human condition.

E.C. Baugh lives and works with his partner, artist Genevieve May, in New York City.