Baker Artist Portfolios

In my current series, I aspire to experience and understand the world through emotion and intuition. My pieces are born from my subconscious, fusing memory with my perception of an idealized scene. I aim to capture the landscapes of our untapped memories. A quiet moment in your childhood backyard after a storm – when the birds just begin to sing again, or the morning sun shining on the road as you drive to work. It is quiet, internal moments like this that fuel me. We live in this amazing world and so many little moments should be perceived as a miracle, as a work of art. I approach each painting with only a loose sense of a place or experience and a vision of where light will reflect. The rest transcends through fine layers and compositional rearrangements.

Through automatic painting, I can pull from my experiences living in Wyoming, Vermont, Maryland, and Colorado, as well as my travels in Southeast Asia, Australia, Europe, and my Summers in the Adirondack Mountains. The landscapes I portray may intertwine more than one place.

By blurring or “fogging” my paintings, I am forcing the viewer to perceive the scene in its entirety. By eliminating tight detail, the eye is not distracted by ‘this or that'. The viewer can perceive the scene as a moment. My hope is that such ambiguity enables each viewer to connect with the scene in his or her own way and pull from a personal memory- a place, a feeling, or a time.

I was trained traditionally, as my artist grandmother put me in classes at a very young age. She considered realism to be the only reputable style. So naturally, by the time I was 12, I was more interested in anything nontraditional. Kids rebel in all forms. In High School, I studied under artist Michael Bare, who fine-tuned my skill in representational painting. I accepted an art scholarship at Towson University in 2010, and there, I started to favor painting surrealistic scenes. I couldn’t shake the traditional realistic approach, but at least the subject matter was thought-provoking and unexpected. For my thesis, I focused on disrupted perspectives. I painted landscapes using both oil and watercolor and layered them so that the deeper oil palette would lay alongside the tighter and flatter watercolor structures. The horizon line was always unclear. I wanted the discussion to question the traditional perspective and what the eye sees in real life.

After graduating, I went to work for a contemporary art gallery in Jackson Hole, representing artists such as Hung Liu, Hunt Slonem, Udo Noger, and Miya Ando. My love for the unconventional took full form and after 4 years with the gallery, I decided to take the plunge to invest myself in finding.a technique that felt exciting, natural, and personal. In 2019, I discovered just that and my current series, “Modern Romantic” was born. In 2020, I debuted my series at my first solo show in Kennebunkport, Maine, which was well received.

What excites me so much about my current series is the rebellion of it. I am going against everything I was taught. I have no image to refer to, my compositions change constantly until the paint is just about dry. I mix wet into wet and make up the lighting without a real thought. It is time sensitive and easy to lose it when you go too far. You must know when to stop but also be willing to squeeze in a new element, risking the entire piece as you do it. The result is never as expected and the knowledge that it cannot be recreated in its exactness is so special. After years of realism, specifically the many portraits, still lives, and landscapes I had been so used to- this was finally a process that pushed me, scared me, and excited me.