Stephen Baker

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Stephen Baker

Statement

 

  

 My ideas and art practice are based on four cornerstones:-

The Invocatory: The meaning in the flow of appearances has to be invoked - either by will or by a rule.

The Hallucinatory: What is there does not look like how we see it; 

The Monadic: The world is not arranged in the pattern of the objects that we see - It is a geometrical matrix of infinite dimensions.  

The Charged Ego: Moving through the world is - the unit in space, the monad in the matrix.

 The components of these ideas:-

 Artistic                The idea ruler          Time sequence

The point                  Dr Dee                       1950 - 1968

Colour                      Various                      1968-1975

The line                    G.W.Leibniz               1978-2008

The mark                  Paul Klee                   2008 - present

Biography

 I was born in 1950 in the midlands. As a child I played in the abandoned infrastructure of the industrial past:- quarries, canals, ash mounds, huge derelict factories with rusting chains whose links were bigger than me. These experiences have shaped my artistic sensibilities.

I spent six years at various art colleges. My Fine art degree course was at Newport College of Art, in South Wales. There I encountered Welsh mythology.

I worked as an art teacher for a short time but teaching was not for me. I spent thirty years as a Chartered Surveyor. This gave me the world of structures, schematic depiction, measurement, as well as the world of numbers and calculation.

In 2008, I became a full time artist. I am developing my private visual language, which incorporates all of these things.