David Graeme Baker bio resume press

In Baker’s work, the rhythm of daily life wins out over incident and drama as the artist lavishes his attention on walls, furnishings, cast-off shoes, tablecloths, strewn toys, and all the other bits and pieces of ordinary life. The sense of importance that these interiors carry is reinforced by the artist’s quite classical sense of composition. In Seventeen every element is placed with enormous care to create a stately and almost monumental sense of interval. The figure is silhouetted off-center against the window, and the various objects and pieces of furniture are balanced left and right, placed so that every form is clearly readable.

“I began painting interiors back in art school,” says Baker, “and for a long time I painted them without figures. When I was studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts I was fortunate enough to have Alfred Leslie as a visiting critic. One day I was struggling with a painting of an interior with a figure sitting in a chair, and he said to me, ‘Don’t worry about the figure, it’s the chair that’s important – after all, it is the seat of humanity!’ It was a funny remark but at the same time one that made quite an impression on me. As much as I enjoyed figure painting I realized that you could make a narrative without the figure.” A recent painting finds Baker still pursuing this strategy. In Spare Room With Montana Guitar, we are confronted with the quintessential spare room. The bed is stripped, and a small grouping of objects – a child’s guitar, a shopping bag, and a pair of flip-flops – has found its way into the room, left there in passing by the family. Revealed in the slow-moving light of this small space they seem to tell us more about family life than a whole canvas full of figures.

All of Baker’s paintings begin with a drawing in his sketchbook. “It starts with an image that I see – a figure in a certain kind of light, an object, or a piece of furniture,” says the artist. “It’s a seed – something that inspires me. I then bring in elements around it creating an ambiguous narrative.” These sketches form the first few elements of a painting. “It goes on from there,” he continues. “Once I get the main elements I’ll move to work on a canvas, and from that point I have open areas that I need to resolve.” Baker finds that he spends considerable amounts of time discovering what he wants to include in his painting and then getting the placement just right. To facilitate his decisions he will often draw an element on a separate piece of paper, cut it out, and then tape it to his canvas, a strategy that allows him to move around easily until he feels he has it in the right place. The artist will then trace through the main lines on the canvas.

Baker next moves into painting, beginning with an umber underpainting. “If there is a figure then I will focus on that first,” he says. “A figure has such visual weight that I work to resolve it early on. I have sometimes added figures late in the game but it is unusual. At this stage I won’t fully close off the forms – I like to leave a certain amount of suggestion in the work. In this underpainting stage I simply leave the lights as open, blank canvas. However, in painting flesh I will often do a grisaille. I’ve really come to love the layering of more transparent warm tones over cool tones in grisaille. In particular, in a face or portrait I like to separate the tonal elements from the color. I can’t get the quality of light I want if I go in directly with color. When I use grisaille I can more easily control the light as I build up the forms with successive layers of paint. If I’m trying to paint directly I feel hostage to what is in front of me.”

Having established the entire painting in monochrome, Baker will then start adding color. “I work almost entirely from life,” says the artist, “but I do use photographs for some of the figure work.” Baker applies his color fairly thinly, working with a delicate touch and keeping the painting lively. He is careful not to overpolish so that the painting never becomes mechanical in appearance and retains a sense of flexibility and surprise. “As much as people think of my paintings as technically oriented,” he says, “I try not to make them feel too perfect.”

For small paintings Baker works on linen glued to panels that he purchases ready-made from New Traditions, a commercial supplier. These come preprimed, and the artist will then put three layers of his own priming on top to obliterate almost all of the tooth. For bruhses, he uses Kaërell synthetic sables made by Raphaël, generally preferring filberts. “They are not expensive, and there is something about the brush response that I’ve become very comfortable with,” he says. “For the first few sessions I can get very fine work out of them but then they start to wear out. I have a big brush graveyard that I turn to when I need to block in the backgrounds.” For large paintings, Baker stretches linen and works with more tooth and bristle brushes, an approach that restrains his temptation to polish up the paintings too much. Baker uses Gamblin paints almost exclusively.

Usually the only addition is Old Holland Cremnitz white, even though the artist has some concerns about using a lead-based paint. “Every time I’ve tried to switch I’ve failed to come up with a good alternative,” he says. “I get a much creamier feel from the Old Holland than I do from any of the substitutes.”

To aid the transparency and workability of his paint Baker ues a cocktail of alkyd- and linseed-based mediums. “I use Winsor & Newton Liquin Fine Detail mixed 50/50 with a Da Vinci copal substitute,” he says. “One is fast drying and the other is slow drying, so between them it seems to work perfectly.” Baker says that he had some concerns about using alkyds because it hasn’t been around long enough to determine whether any darkening will eventually occur. However, if he stays away from alkyds he finds that he runs into problems with the slow drying times of many traditional mediums. “As I am working on a painting, I will put glazes of shadow masses and halftones to link them together,” he says. “When layering transparent and semitransparent passages I encounter trouble with the drying time of traditional mediums. I don’t want to make the passages too dense, so I find myself having to stop and let the paint dry. I’m anxious to get on with a painting, and the faster drying time of the alkyds allows me to do this.” So far, the artist says, he hasn’t noticed any deterioration in his pieces over the years.

Gradually, Baker has come to do larger and more complex figure paintings. Two recent pictures are particularly intriguing. In one, Gill’s Lapthe artist shows a young woman sitting thoughtfully on a sofa while a little boy sprawls with a hand raised in the air, lost in some childish daydream. They are surrounded once again by the trappings of an ordinary domestic interior: a sleeping dog, a piece of patterned fabric and a paper airplane. And once again the composition is carefully balanced and articulated to achieve a kind of monumental repose. What is happening in the picture is note quite clear, we are not sure if it is a moment of normalcy and calm or if something more mysterious and meaningful is taking place.

“Actually, I’m always telling myself a story as I construct the paintings,” says the artist. “But it’s not necessarily the same story that I want the viewers to get from it. In fact, sometimes I’ll deliberately make a narrative more obscure.”

The second painting is R.T.’s Paper Crown, which shows a woman sleeping on a sofa while two young children play. Behind them on the wall is a snippet of a N.C. Wyeth painting. Here the dream of art and the clamor of day-to-day life with young children join seamlessly and surprisingly to make a curious and splendid vision. Clearly this is territory the artist knows well, as he divides his days between panting and bringing up his young family. The image he creates celebrate the joys of both of these worlds.

About the Artist
David Baker was born in 1968 in Cape Town, South Africa, but moved with his family to the United States at the age of 2. He studied at Wesleyan University, in Middletown, Connecticut, where he says he was slow to discover painting. “It wasn’t until my third year that I decided to be an art major,” he says. “I was floundering around a bit – I think that painting really saved my life.” Baker went on to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, in Philadelphia. He credits a number of teachers with providing him with inspiration including painters Tula Telfair and Glenn Rudderow, as well as draftsman and printmaker Steven Fischer. “He’s an amazing draftsman,” says Baker of the latter, “but he also impressed me because he insisted that the quality of his work was not the result of talent but because he worked really hard at it. This was a time when I was around people who had much more studio experience than I had, and I felt a bit outclassed. His words really kept me going.” Baker lived and worked in Philadelphia for several years before moving with his wife to the Maine coast eight years ago. “We came because my wife was offered a job in a small college up here,” he says. “At first I was a little fearful of leaving the lively art scene of the Mid-Atlantic, but it has turned out to be a very good move.” For more information on Baker, visit his website at www.davidgbakerpaintings.com.

New Works 2010
Download Catalog (2.4MB)
Price: $14 Postage Paid
Order: 207-667-6611 or info@courthousegallery.com

Ballinglen Fellowship, 2009
Download Catalog (2.2MB)
Price: $18 Postage Paid
Order: 207-667-6611 or info@courthousegallery.com

New Works 2008
Download Catalog (1.8MB)
Price: $12 Postage Paid
Order: 207-667-6611 or info@courthousegallery.com