{"id":1877,"date":"2012-10-03T11:43:32","date_gmt":"2012-10-03T11:43:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=1877"},"modified":"2012-10-03T11:46:12","modified_gmt":"2012-10-03T11:46:12","slug":"fleeting-moments-hidden-order","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=1877","title":{"rendered":"Fleeting moments, hidden order"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Sleeping Cat, Chris Baker<\/p><\/div>\n

When I stopped in to pick up one of my paintings from the back room at Oxford Gallery<\/a> yesterday, I couldn\u2019t stop looking at Chris Baker\u2019s<\/a> new paintings. He\u2019s one of three outstanding artists on view in Water Works.<\/em> All three are exploring the power of a water-based medium with amazing skill. Chip Stevens\u2019 assurance with watercolor reminds me of a Japanese or Chinese painter\u2019s fearless, irrevocable brushwork and use of negative space. And Barbara Fox\u2019s images obsessively and meticulously return to glass globes strewn across surfaces they absorb and reflect. They struck me as a visualization of a heightened state of mind where the boundary between self and other has dropped away\u2014no small achievement for what are essentially highly realistic still lifes. So I\u2019m not doing justice to the masterful work of his co-exhibitors by focusing on Baker, yet Baker\u2019s work calls for celebration in a special way because I\u2019m finally beginning to feel<\/em> what he\u2019s up to. I\u2019ve always admired his prolific ability to evoke light and form as well as a more ethereal sense of time and place in his scenes, but often I\u2019ve wanted to simplify his images as I\u2019m looking at them. He tackles everyday life in all its complexity, never editing out the detritus. If there\u2019s a random rock sitting on that street, you\u2019ll find it in the painting. What\u2019s remarkable in these paintings is both how complex and yet unified they seem.<\/p>\n

Baker seems to take his camera everywhere\u2014the Oxford show includes some marvelous views from New York City\u2014and then he paints in gouache by working from his snapshots. He offers fleeting glimpses of the world he moves through every day. Baker\u2019s adherence to what is actually there reminds me of Fairfield Porter\u2019s<\/a> allegiance to the often awkward way things and people occupy their space in the world: like Porter, Baker seems to consider it almost an ethical obligation to report almost exactly what he sees. There\u2019s no staging. No setting up. It\u2019s simply whatever is there, transformed into paint. And yet, without distorting or stylizing what he sees, Baker somehow conveys more than the actual. You get more than surfaces in his scenes, though it\u2019s hard to articulate what that more<\/em> is. (For me, that elusive more<\/em> is the whole point of picking up a brush.)<\/p>\n

The strength of his work is, in part, formal. He seems to have a rigorously geometric sense of form and volume, but not to the exclusion of his sensitivity toward whatever quality of light is bathing the world he\u2019s recreating. In a stunning painting of Rochester\u2019s graffiti-tagged aqueduct, the incredibly crisp rigor of his lines, both angular and curving, as they converge toward a far turn in the tunnel, remind me of Canaletto\u2019s precision and his ability to unify the complexity of a sometimes chaotic level of detail. Canaletto\u2019s image of a ruined building represents a similar ability to create a visually compelling image out of something most would consider essentially an eyesore. Baker does this again and again. In his work, you sense a constant awareness of the pure Platonic cube or sphere or cone within the imperfect vessel, in an actual planter or a recessed window or a car waiting at a red light, and even in the shape of his human figures. It\u2019s as if he feels the structure of what he\u2019s painting in his fingertips as he renders it. At the same time, though, on the surface of his paper he uses patterns of color and value to anchor these apparently complicated scenes with simplifying compositional relationships. Bits of the same orange appear almost as points of an invisible triangle in Sleeping Cat<\/em>, and they work with areas of yellow and blue to give an underlying abstract armature to what would seem to most an extremely messy scene of an urban dig. There\u2019s a tiny patch of near-black in a recessed nook of the Caterpillar earthmover, which, for me, acts as a pivot for the entire scene, the rest of which is painted in lighter values. The image revolves around that little patch of black.<\/p>\n

The formal strength of this work, though, can be a distraction from a more subtle and more difficult to articulate quality that infuses itself into the world he evokes. Painting is always about time, in one way or another. It\u2019s an unnatural act. It\u2019s a way of denying the passage of time by somehow capturing moments of experience before they\u2019re gone. Painting makes a poignant claim on a sense of lost time\u2014reminding you of how things are constantly going away, receding into the past, which only accentuates the sense that every moment can be a marvel. With Baker, that marvel can be nothing more than standing on Manhattan\u2019s Hi Line and looking down on an ordinary scene of pedestrians and traffic, or gazing down into construction site where a street seems to have become a gravel pit. Somehow, the way Baker paints it, regardless of what it is, you feel the angle and temperature of the sunlight, the quality of the season, the feel of the air moving through the city\u2014all the things that would make the hair stand up on your arms if you were to return from the dead to sample the taste and smell and light of daily life without having to worry about losing them this time around. The most ordinary things become fascinating, and they never get old.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I stopped in to pick up one of my paintings from the back room at Oxford Gallery yesterday, I couldn\u2019t stop looking at Chris Baker\u2019s new paintings. He\u2019s one of three outstanding artists on view in Water Works. All three are exploring the power of a water-based medium with amazing skill. Chip Stevens\u2019 assurance […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nFleeting moments, hidden order - represent<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=1877\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Fleeting moments, hidden order - represent\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"When I stopped in to pick up one of my paintings from the back room at Oxford Gallery yesterday, I couldn\u2019t stop looking at Chris Baker\u2019s new paintings. 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