The Art of Memory – The work of Ian Baker
By Helen Murphy and Nick Pelling
Is it possible to paint a memory? It’s difficult: memories don’t keep still. They slip and slide and mutate. It is a bit like Marlene Dumas’s question, can you draw a love affair? You can draw a kiss, but you can’t conjure up the silly, urgent texture of emotion so easily.
It seemed to us – having seen the recent exhibition Then and Now at the Electro Studios – that the Hastings painter Ian Baker works very much in this slippery and ambiguous territory. We went along to Baker’s studio to talk to him about his approach to painting. Ian is a soft-spoken and rather thoughtful gent, not given to blowing his painterly trumpet. But his work is very intriguing. The first thing that struck us about it is that many of his scenes involve figures in woods. Or driving through woods. Why? We offered the idea that the woods are mysterious: places where things, like time, get lost. And where strange forces live. Ian was hesitant.
The buttons on your coat by Ian Baker; Ian Baker
Jumping to cliches does not help. You have to let Baker’s work slowly talk to you. One of his pictures, in particular, is quite haunting: an empty bedroom with two beds in it and woods out of the window. And, rather weirdly, there are also saplings in the bedroom and even seeming to grow out of the beds. We quizzed him about this work. He commented after some longish pauses, that this was based upon a recollection of his childhood when he shared a room with his brother. The bedroom of his memory looked out on an orchard. The scene is without people but something about the energetic brushwork seems to leave a trace of the frantic energy of a bedroom in which boys collide. We suggested that the painting had a slightly eery quality. It emerged later in our conversation that his brother had passed away. We let this fact seep in as we stared at the canvas. It is undoubtedly a powerful piece
But it would be wrong to assume that his paintings are always about dark memories. Ian clearly recollects life within the family with warmth and fondness. He told us engagingly about his father and mother’s heroic annual efforts to take them on adventurous holidays by driving down to Spain in a Sunbeam Alpine. The interior of a car seems to be a psychic space that attracts him. He spoke dryly about the absurdity of people in metal boxes, usually just staring ahead. We all know that zombified condition of a road trip. As he said, “there is often a sort of profundity in the banal, if you can capture it.”
There is something fast and loose about his brushwork. He explained that he is sort of in love with the messy, runny nature of paint. He said that he has stopped worrying about sterile questions as to whether a painting is still relevant in our digital post-everything age. But somehow the simple messy fact of paint on canvas pulls him back. But he has evidently given paint and painters a lot of thought. He has imbibed certain influences, such as the muted and almost washed-out palette of Luc Tuymans. And you could also pick up a whiff of the Edvard Munch manner of trying to get oil colour to speak in emotions. This gives his work a sort of tentative or even unfinished feel. That, maybe, is truer to the messiness of life.
Ian is very much a Hastings artist. Indeed, he has extremely positive memories of his time at Hastings Art College under the tutelage of the immensely influential Rod Harman. He sees himself as part of the Harman school. “He just had a way of opening your eyes to other ways of doing things.” Evidently, Harman has inspired many to devote themselves to the practice of art. This is not an easy choice for anyone to make. Ian explains that after graduating from Canterbury Art School, like so many young arts graduates, you are just sort of allowed to “fall off the career cliff.” All fine arts graduates face the same problem: how do I remain true to Art and still eat?
This is a timeless dilemma: Baker’s response was to take his artistic commitment into the world of care work. He is clearly passionate about the ability of art to help troubled people. Having said this, he has a healthy skepticism for the psycho-babble that often masquerades as therapy theory. His philosophy is essentially that what people want is “simple human connection”. It is a good point. And it is also what his paintings try to achieve. An attempt to communicate both with others but also, in some ways, with himself. To connect with something lost. To try to pin something down. Not easy, but certainly very fascinating.
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