“No matter what I tried, what fit best was work that involved my love of something small-scale and intimate.”
Richard Baker
Posted inArt
And you can send me dead flowers every morning…
It is the beginning of a new year and for some reason I have been thinking about flower paintings — perhaps prompted by the flower paintings that Edouard Manet made while he was dying.
Posted inArt
Dirty Hands and Dirty Minds Can Make for Good Art
I do know that I had no intention of writing about the two exhibitions currently at Tibor de Nagy, John Ashbery & Guy Maddin: Collages and Richard Baker: The Doctor is Out, when I went to the gallery.
Posted inArt
Richard Baker Kicks Out the Jams
For the past decade, Richard Baker has developed two distinct but related bodies of work, one in oil and the other in gouache: the oil paintings depict tabletops covered with all sorts of printed ephemera and bric-a-brac; the gouaches are of book covers and, more recently, record covers.
Posted inBooks
Richard Baker, Physiognomist of Our Past and Future
Richard Baker is best known for his still-life paintings of tabletops, often tilted at impossible angles and covered with out-of-print art books and other bric-a-brac, such as ceramic pots, to-go food containers, candy bars, and tulips. Ranging from the lowbrow Learn to Draw by Jon Gnagy (Mr. “Learn-To-Draw”) to the hefty catalogue of the exhibition Paris-New York (1977) — the year the artist graduated from high school — Baker’s non-hierarchical representations form an inventory of the books that have, at different times, been central to his ongoing education, stretching from when he was a teenager until the present.