In Baker’s work there is both courage and connection, a sense of known landscape. Among the paintings’ great spaces, gestures and shadows, illuminated openings, translucent and opaque ledges, I sense where to leap and jump. My body knows how stillness hums. Where vast space falls, I fall. Somehow the light carries color and emanates from an opening within myself. ..The logical density and weightlessness of these painted spaces balance an understanding: outer and inner ecologies the same.
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Baker doesn’t call herself an environmental artist, and I know many landscape painters who try to create a political narrative will instead end up pulled in the direction of love, absorption, and wonder. But if we can think poetically, think in translations, why does one love affair with Earth not connect to another? Baker’s visual language creates a shared experience of absorption. She communicates the landscape as continuation of self, transmitting our shared, helpless love of Earth. So although we can’t explain this idea well in words, or print it in the headlines, its possible that paintings like hers are the most honest eco-criticism we are capable of.