Baker Artist Portfolios

After locating in Maryland in 1984, I earned an MFA in Studio Painting at Towson University.
An artist who has supported my studio by teaching credit classes at Universities and Colleges for over 35 years, I now teach and mentor students at my Ellicott City location.  Exhibiting and being awarded for drawing, oil, watercolor,  installation, and digital animation, I have also curated well received regional exhibits of work by area colleagues.

Recently I had been working from the gesture life model with short, active poses as the basis of figuration.  But isolation during Covid months has changed the availability of everything.  Adapting to having no models and being "safe" in workspace corners at home, I chose to focus on faces painted in smaller scale.  The faces of people finally speaking out, thinking, sleeping, laughing provide insightful connections to our own feelings. And text has become a frequent inclusion.  Quarantine made a lot of faces available on television.

I miss being with other people and unwittingly surrounded myself with face works in progress. Cutting stencils from the value shapes and contours of my own watercolor paintings, I can make multiples quickly.  Resolving them as variations takes more time.  But during the totally intense time of developing each painting, it becomes a personal companion for the duration of its resolution and possibly beyond.

A twentieth century artist evolving into the twenty-first century. I am engaged by possibilities with actual, virtual, imagined, and invented spaces. My twentieth century journey through drawing and painting has connected with digital imaging and installation.

I use varied media for my contemporary expressions. Graphite, oil, watercolor, mixed media, pixels, recycled art magazines, and flea market found 12" dolls are among my materials at hand. In a connection of ideas and experiences I explore the extent to which art works come from the elusive, shifting, thing called reality.

As imagination, invention, storytelling, and improvising come into play, each work gains a layered visual history of active surfaces. This suggests that many things are happening simultaneously, and it gives viewers an opportunity to investigate their own personal responses.