Comment by James Hamilton

There is an explosive energy in the canvases where even the expression of a quiet day by the sea reveals nerve- racking broody undercurrents. A sudden sunblaze, slapped down during its momentary appearance, can burn the retina.

 These paintings are neither impressionist nor expressionist, but collected ruminations of a contemplative mind caught in a restless body. 

In the high summer of 2017, Christopher Baker took his board-bound sketchbook, 23 kilos and over a metre long, to Cummingoya in the Norwegian Arctic. Film on YouTube shows this bulky man labouring under its weight like a dung beetle in a crisis. It was late June, but still temperatures could fall to minus degrees centigrade with wind-chill, and in any event Baker had to work very fast indeed before his paints froze. These are conditions that Christopher Baker will embrace when working on a series of paintings. 

By comparison, the hours he has spent painting on The Trundle near Goodwood, or on the beach at Climping, might look easy - but they're not, for in all his choice of subjects the common factor is Baker's mental and physical energy and, one has to say it, his bloody-mindedness. 

The Cummingoya sketchbook, all 23 kilos of it, contains Baker's expression of the rock, snow, ice and water that forms that forbidding ancient terrain. His dancing brushes, the one spark of life in this wilderness, evoke its emptiness, and makes manifest the enormity of the tasks that Baker has shouldered. He demonstrates what is all around us, demanding we look at it, and see it, and experience its vitality. These are not pictures, they are paintings.

James Hamilton

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