NYAEA Member’s Spot Light— Nancy Baker: A Blue Cascade that Appeared to be Water
Nancy Baker, “Infinite Sky and Ocean” 2019 UAE installation
By Michael Gormley
Nancy Baker is back in New York, having recently returned from Sharjah, United Arab Emirates where she was invited to participate in the Islamic Art Festival. For the show, Baker created a large site installation based on the poetry of Rumi. She adds, “I am always feeling expansive when I am installing a large scaled project. I used to fabricate large scale commissioned stained glass panels. I’m really a medievalist. Creating large works that are deeply layered seems to be my métier. It works for me, and I am always deeply engaged in this process of creating components, and then figuring out how to install them in the most successful manner. I am always profoundly worried before I install a new piece. But it always works to my utter amazement.
Like all of us, Baker has yet to fully comprehend, yet alone find her bearing, in the surreal nightmare that shrouds our world. Baker has confined her studio work to the kitchen. “It’s hard to believe”, she notes and adds sardonically, “I work on a counter-top, busy creating my magnum opus of small scaled work”. She then counters, in a more subdued tone, “Mathematical equations and words now comfort me , and perhaps enrage me as well. This is good for me.”
Parachute Jump, Remnant of Steeplechase Amusement Park, Coney Island
Even for die-hard New Yorkers, Baker’s feisty resolve is a stand-out; but she is a rarity, a home-grown New Yorker, born and raised in Brooklyn’s Coney Island---home to a once bustling, albeit kitschy, seaside amusement park. During Baker’s childhood Coney Island was a microcosm of a city in decline, a tarnished and sometimes criminal carnival holding on by the skin of its teeth. But there was the sea. “My parents were artists,” Baker notes, “The solitude and sublime beauty of living near the sea fascinated them. My early exposure to the ocean’s tidal surges, and the extreme boom and bust economy of seaside resorts, subsequently had an equal impact on my aesthetic sensibilities as well.”
Not that being raised in the company of artists was all stormy seas and fixed carny games; there were merits to having a mother that was an Ab Ex painter and a father who was a black and white photographer. Baker recalls frequent trips to museums and Tenth Street galleries. “My parents often took my brother and I to MoMA. I loved “Hide and Seek” by Pavel Tchekitchev. When I see that painting today, I am amazed at how scary it really is.” There were also countless hours at the Café Figaro in the Village pouring over tarot card readings. “My mother was a full-on mystic and belonged to a spiritual order, Baker recalls, “I can see her pulling the Magician card like it was yesterday, smiling wistfully, and saying that it was a harbinger of a golden happiness --the magic power of creativity”. Baker stops, and adds, “I think that’s when I decided to become an artist.”
Pavel Tchelitchew, Hide and Seek, Oil on Canvas, 1942, 6' 6 1/2" x 7' 3/4", Courtesy MoMA Painting and Sculpture Permanent Collection
Baker studied painting at SVA; professing to lionize Agnes Martin, she simultaneously, and somewhat incongruously, made frequent trips up the Cloisters to view the Merode Altarpiece. The Hours of Etienne Chevalier by Jean Fouquet equally caught her eye. Baker explains, “So on the one hand there is Robert Gober, Rebecca Horn, Peter Doig and Gerard David, artists whose work I greatly admire and in between visiting their shows, I’m purchasing essential tomes on Northern Renaissance Art and monographs on Grant Wood. That’s a lot of ground to cover --a steady effort underscored by both an open mind and fueled by a willingness to go to any lengths to find an authentic voice; ultimately that exploration required that I steer myself far away from my parents’ sensibilities.”
Indeed; “This is POKEY” a painting from 2007 pictured here, exemplifies Baker’s early medievalist -inspired style---a far cry from both her father’s documentary photography and her mother’s painterly abstraction. The detailed rendering, stylized figures and decorative embellishments extensively quote the archaic illustrations that one would expect to find in a gothic age Book of Hours. However lovingly these elements are composed, such that Baker does not appear at all disingenuous in her near gushing appropriation, she knows from kitsch, and strategically blows up the ready ammo she has provided her critics by baiting them with cutesy elements ---hence porky and puppy. Having outsmarted the modernist view , by poking fun at it, Baker moves past its proscriptive aesthetics and defiantly embraces the naïve and the jubilant--the aesthetics of her childhood. Baker concurs, “There was and continues to be something carnivalesque in my work, but I seek to mitigate that with elements that point to a larger conceptual scope. For example my usage of medieval workers and peasants were repositioned in my own paintings to offer a contemporary interpretation of the struggle of life.”
Nancy Baker, “This is POKEY,” 2007, 48 x 48 inches, oil on panel, Collection of Kelly McChesney, Raleigh, NC
Peel away the skin of a Benson and you get to Pollock. As Benson’s ever observant and devoted student, Pollock got that it wasn’t the imagery that made his mentor’s paintings come alive--though said imagery was striking---it was the syncopated, eye-grabbing, jazz-inspired rhythms coursing through his compositions that made the work great. Pollock’s hunch hit pay dirt while studying Benson’s composition diagrams (prior to his better known Regionalist period, Benson worked in a non-objective style dubbed Synchonism). He began by painting Benson’s bones; later he painted his movement.
Nancy Baker, “Albatross”, 2019, Paint on hand and laser cut paper, 28” x 22”, based on “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner” an epic poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
The evolution of Baker’s work from representational tableaus to sculptural installations has seemingly followed a similar trajectory. If we imagine an underpinning cellular or crystalline structure scaffolding “This is POKEY”, we might arrive at “Albatross”. The piece, from 2019, is comprised of painted hand and laser cut paper, and references Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s epic poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. Baker adds, “I have always been open to the opportunity of change. My paintings didn’t make sense when I moved back to NYC ten years ago. The infrastructure of the city reinvented my vision, and mathematical formulas offered me a comfort and stability in this era of anti-scientific bias. For me there is always a crossover of using materials in a painterly way, and infusing them with conceptual heft.”
Nancy Baker, Rust and Stardust, 2019, Paint on hand and laser cut paper, 26” x 24”, based on a quote from the novel Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
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For paper installations, Baker sometimes uses a laser cutter in Rome, NY called Smidgens.But most of the elements are hand cut from forms she prints using a color printer. Baker adds that “I always paint and spray over anything I print. It always improves the appearance; I also use lots of blades and knives for my work. I also have many, many hole punches in different sizes. I recently had oval shapes laser cut for my project in the UAE, I created a blue cascade that appeared to be water. The Rumi poem that I used had sea and ocean imagery. The title of the piece is “Infinite Ocean and Sky”. I am so happy with that work.
In this time and this place, which now makes Coney Island in the 1970s seem near paradisiacal, the ability to radically reinvent is no longer a charmingly fashionable and bankable art career trick---it may just save your life. “I can no longer keep fabricating the same thing over and over, Baker notes, “the pandemic demands new narratives---which is wretchedly demanding. But there is no way around it; there is no running away--there is only the yawning, threatening to engulf void that artists have always faced. It’s a battle we know how to fight--and sometimes win. We know that full-on frontal assaults rarely turn the tide. We choose first to go within, and trust that the outer world will shape itself to mirror that renewed intimacy with the authentic self.”
Baker hopes to move to a new studio in May and is looking forward to starting large work again. “My new studio is in Bushwick, at the Venus Knitting Mills Building”, she stops, “… it might be a long time before I can actually be there. In the meantime I will sleep tonight, wake in the morning and in spite of it all keep working.”