This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  The following, submitted by Richard Carta, was written in a 1948 magazine story "COURAGE ON CANVAS" by Arnold Nicholson
EARL BAILLY'S paintings have no obvious connection with medicine. Most of them mirror the tiny farms, the fishing boats and the rocky seacoast of Nova Scotia, where he lives(now deceased). Yet, of all the individuals who have bought pictures at his Lunenburg studio or in galleries elsewhere, physicians prize his work the most.
They find more curative power for crippled, handicapped patients in one Bailly canvas than in a whole chestfulof medicines. For Earl Bailly, from infancy, has been paralyzed from his shoulders to his toes. He taught himself to paint with a brush held between his teeth.
It was an M.D., quietly recounting the near-miracles of recovery that he credited to a Bailly canvas on his wall, who first told me that artist's story. But not until I met Earl Bailly, age 45, his understanding mother and his brother, Don, did I learn how bright and strong and useful a man can be who lives on courage alone.
Earl Bailly was less than three years old when polio left him without the use of either his arms or his legs. By the time he was six, his father, a blacksmith, had taught him to write with a pencil held in his mouth. A crude drawing that he brother Don became Earl's constant companion and helper. He entered in a Canadian magazine contest and won a prize when he was eleven years old. That prize fired his ambition' and revealed his stubborn will. His family was skeptical at first but realized that painting was his inspiration.
Earl's younger brother Don, at 16 years of age, drove Earl to Eastport, Maine to study under famed artist George Pearce Ennis. That was the only formal art schooling Earl ever received. He was well into his twenties before he held his first exhibit in the living room at home. All Lunenburg attended, and ever painting was sold. It' was his most gratifying day of his life and soon after his work was hung in almost every museum in Canada.
Earl Bailly worked in many different mediums --charcoal, watercolors and more recently oils and painted four to five hours a day. Some years ago he made a few linoleum block prints, an art form requiring delicate chisels.
Earl and Don have been spending their summers in Florida in a trailer and they have gone to sea with local fishermen. Despite his handicap, Earl has complete faith in himself and in others and most of all he understands and likes people, who in turn like and admire him.
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