The character fitted perfectly with the painter's shift to more surreal subject matter.
"It's funny how it all seems to tie together," Baines, 43, says of his resultant painting, Off to Join the Circus. "You put this colourful little character who represents my personality in this brooding sky with an ochre field and little cows, and it just seems to look so right – even though it's a surreal image."
It would be easy to assume that the other, bowler-hatted, umbrella-carrying figures in Baines's Existentialist series were similarly appropriated from a great Belgian surrealist, Rene Magritte. However, the inspiration was more direct – and pivotal to Baines's own decision to become a painter.
"When I was 14, my parents took me back to England to visit the relatives," says Baines, who had emigrated from Colchester when he was just one year old. "One morning we caught the Underground. I went down onto the platform and I was greeted by a sea of formally dressed, bowler-hatted men, holding their umbrellas and briefcases. It just looked so incredible, because they were all clones and they all looked lifeless ... waiting for their train to come in.
"That stayed in my subconscious for years and years."
It resurfaced when Baines was 17 and got his first job as a display artist with John Martin's department store. "I'd be on the bus with all these commuters and think to myself that this is exactly the same as the bowler-hat men – but much more Australian, more casual. I used to think their lives were already spelled out for them. They go to work from nine to five every day, go home on Saturday and watch the footy, renovate the house, get married. I thought to myself, 'I don't want to be like this'."
At 21, Baines escaped being a "corporate battery hen", and worked as a freelance artist until age 30, but still found himself in a rut. He turned to fine art, initially painting surreal worlds which he says had "no real substance" and failed to strike a resonance with buyers.
Although Baines had spent his life by the beach – his studio is still the Grange home he shares with wife Jacqueline and their three daughters – he had ignored the "painfully obvious" subject until others pointed him toward it. "Then I found a bit of something in the beach I was able to represent in my own, unique way," he says.
He began enjoying sell-out shows and commissions from as far away as the UK and Switzerland. But the popularity of Baines's beachside portraits, bronzed lifesavers and art deco-style bathing beauties created a trap of its own, in the end making him "just a complete commercial artist".
He decided to once again take a risk and combine elements of this commercial style with his original vision. Now his ocean shallows and sand dunes are populated by half-buried alarm clocks, circus performers and herds of cow-like chairs. "They've still got that nice aesthetic mood but then you've got my underlying, self-conscious feelings on life coming through," he says.
In January, he took the direction a step further, staging surrealist "living sculpture events" at Tennyson beach in Adelaide and St Kilda in Melbourne, with hundreds of volunteers wading into the shallows at dawn.
Photographs and video excerpts from a planned documentary will be displayed with Baines's paintings at his upcoming exhibition.
"Life is about trying things, being adventurous, going out on a limb, throwing yourself into deep water," he says. "To me, it's like a big story and everything is a chapter."
Andrew Baines exhibits at Greenhill Galleries from May 21 to June 13.
