Baker Artist Portfolios

I continue painting, though video is key, and I am currently digitizing all of my older analogue audio recording (largely for integration into video). "Multi-paradigmatic" is crucial to my entire outlook, in terms of any or all media. This idea is that any one artistically theoretical approach has its strengths, and possibly its weaknesses.

The most recent black and white line abstractions capture the fractal nature of trees as the antennae in a playful underlying grid for sharing natures bountiful source of energy and language.

Painting Rag Shirts

I’m making parallel sets of paintings: one intentional, the other created from what’s left behind.  My painting rags have accumulated for over 40 years, a byproduct of wiping paint, blending it, and cleaning hand-cut stencil and stamps. My palette has changed many times over the years.  Without any conscious effort, these cut up T-shirts rags become paintings.

This project shows a number of tabletop sculptures. These sculptures are made to investigate movement, structure, shape and design. Some become studies for larger scale sculptures, other sculptures offer the opportunity to explore shape and movement.. Examples are M.T. Skirt (#1 &#4) and Woolgathering models.

"I started doing kinetic pieces in undergraduate school at the Kansas City Art Institute. The Institute stressed doing outdoor work because it was the Midwest and they had all this outdoor space but no gallery space. I'd make something inside and it would look really huge. I'd take it outdoors and all of a sudden it would be just tiny. I wanted things to be bigger so they could be seen from far away and I wondered what they looked like from the other side? so I thought what if it turned and it could move for you?

These are flyers for Art Shows I curate at my home. I call them lightly curated shows because I ask artists to participate but do not choose their work. All art shows also feature musicians or performing artists of some kind. My comics are made on the mac program Comic Life. The images are mostly those collected on the internet through image searches of subjects that interest me. When put together they form a narrative. These are all one pages comics and not meant to be "read" as a page by page story.

The Grey Series is a suite of fourteen oil paintings begun in 2006 using a limited color palette. The first eight paintings are complete.

Grey 1 was inspired by Japanese brush painting and the gift of an orchid. Each painting informs the next in the series, in homage to Barnett Newman's Stations of the Cross.

In October 2015, I was invited to  participate in the first-ever, international Madonnari Arts Festival in Baltimore's Little Italy.  For three days, I painted outside - in the rain - directly on a 10 foot by 10 foot square of the asphalt on High Street.  Each day I would begin again, since the rain had washed away the work from the day before. 

I created my own original piece on the street from my own acrylic sketches.  I chose not to copy from a great master or grid out an existing work of art.  I preferred the challenge of the live energy and experience. 

Sometimes photos can have a quality that transcends the thing being photographed and stand on their own, just for the shapes, textures, and composition. These are a few that I could imagine being drawings, paintings, sculptures or installations if they weren't photographs.

More of my favorite scenes from Charm City. Almost every day, often several times a day, I see things from the absurd to the mundane that I feel the need to capture in photos. The strangeness and variety found all around Baltimore makes it hard to resist, and the fact that that scene might be gone the next time I'm there makes me want to catch it while I can.