Viewing Chris Baker’s paintings serially gives us much the feeling of browsing through a photograph album. Compositionally, each of the works is a "snapshot," frozen in time and extolling the commonplace. Taken together, they give us a haunting view of rural American life. This is a place where time moves slowly and where the inhabitants live in comfortable reciprocity with nature. But Baker’s compositions keep us firmly outside the world he depicts. Devices such as the strong positioning of the light source make us aware that the simple beauty passes as quickly as we perceive it. And lest we miss the point, the artist adds the traditional memento mori: the occasional country graveyard, the worn and rusted vehicles, and the overpass which informs us that "Dan is dead."

Baker’s pastoral vision is qualified, however, by a strong admixture of Social Realism. If time moves slowly, we sense often that its weight is oppressive. The architectural incongruity of the buildings in Looking East After the Storm suggest a more general lack of direction or overall purpose. Likewise, in Evening Sun or Fall Sun the facades have a tonal flatness which hints at the banality of the lives within. But it is in the intensely lit but deserted areas of his night paintings that we feel most dramatically the loneliness and occasional isolation of this world.

In creating each of these effects, the artist finds gouache a highly versatile medium. Its viscosity allows him to "draw" with his brush, producing the strong illustrationist character of the work. Yet, the medium can be applied in thin washes to create the marvelously varied tonal effects of his skies, or it can be layered on the surface to provide the resonant luminosity of Baker’s night scenes.

Chris Baker earned his Master of Fine Arts degree at Rochester Institute of Technology, studying with the late Fred Meyer. His work has been included in prestigious juried exhibitions such as the Finger Lakes Exhibition at Rochester’s Memorial Art Gallery, the Cooperstown National, and at the Schweinfurth Museum in Auburn. He has had one-man shows at many upstate New York galleries. He has taught art in Cato, New York, for over twenty years, and in 1974 he was artist-in-residence at Letchworth State Park. Baker lives in Weedsport, New York, with his wife, Barbara.