The youths would drink and paint and yarn. At the same time, Baddeley was running his first kitchen as chef at the Sandown Park Hotel when he was just 19.
“Ever since I can remember I have been drawing. What you see in the show is what comes out of my head and it's been this way ever since I can remember.
“I never wanted to draw what I saw, I wanted to draw what was I thinking in my mind. Even when I was a little guy.”
Much of his childhood was spent at Matawhero where his grandparents ran the Bridge Hotel.
“I remember going over the Matawhero bridge, on the old road before they put the new bridge in, and there was an old bridge made out of steel and the kids used to run over the top and play there. It was very scary.
“I looked at it about five years ago and it's nothing much of a bridge, but to me it was like climbing over the biggest bridge in the world.”
Baddeley used to doodle and draw pictures of a big rivet when his grandmother asked him, ‘Why don't you just draw the bridge?' ”
But to Baddeley the bridge wasn't interesting, it was the steel angles that caught his eye.
Most of his work is autobiographical and reflects his own thoughts and memories.
“I stand in front of the canvas and I just look at it. There's no sketching. No thoughts. I don't want to have anything in my mind whatsoever.”
He loathes realism, that is, paintings of objects in their natural state, like landscapes and pictures of fruit. Plenty of his friends are realist painters and make good money from doing so but Baddeley is not interested.
“I said to them, you know the painting before you even start. At the end of the day you're sitting there in your house and you've got a painting of the view on your wall that's outside the bloody house. At the end of the day, it turns me cold. I'd never buy anything like that.”
Instead he wants to see the person behind the brush.
“How has your struggle been represented in this painting? I want to feel the artist.”
Recently he was given a load of small canvases, a strange situation for Baddeley as he generally paints on a large scale.
“But I got into it and the more I got into it the more interesting it became for me. A couple of those little things are outstanding, I love them.”
It is rare for the busy man to put on an exhibition. Instead, painting for Baddeley is a cathartic exercise — therapy with a brush.
“I don't show them. No one sees them. I paint over them and paint over them again and I paint over them again.”
Most of the works on show are abstract paintings popping with shape and colour, but one of the paintings in the show sticks out from the rest — a body with the face of a tui.
Rogers, who helped put the exhibition together, saw the painting of the tui-person, loved it and asked if it could join the others. Baddeley begrudgingly agreed.
“Everyone loves it because they can identify with it. It looks like a bird and that's why it's cool.”
The Kent Baddeley exhibition runs at Verve cafe until mid-April.
