Page 5 - OSG: Christopher Baker: Midnight Sun

Christopher Baker His aim then was to paint the landscape from the same
spot every day whatever the weather, a purpose repeated at
In the high summer of 2017, Christopher Baker took his Climping, Cummingøya and elsewhere. The competition
board-bound sketchbook, 23 kilos and over a metre long, to was with himself, and by means of this slow drumbeat of
Cummingøya in the Norwegian Arctic. Film on YouTube shows repetition, ‘the outer eye is withheld’. Baker goes on to say
this bulky man labouring under its weight like a dung beetle in in his film’s voiceover, ‘instead I reach for an inner vision
a crisis. that is only felt. Delaying. Gradually what was seen through
the dark is brought forward, brighter, whiter, more intense,
It was late June, but still temperatures could fall to minus pure hues, that shine inwards from the outside.’
degrees centigrade with wind-chill, and in any event Baker
had to work very fast indeed before his paints froze. These are The Cummingøya sketchbook, all 23 kilos of it, contains
conditions that Christopher Baker will embrace when working Baker’s expression of the rock, snow, ice and water that
on a series of paintings. By comparison, the hours he has spent forms that forbidding ancient terrain. His dancing brushes,
painting on The Trundle near Goodwood, or on the beach the one spark of life in this wilderness, evoke its emptiness,
at Climping, might look easy - but they’re not, for in all his and makes manifest the enormity of the tasks that Baker has
choice of subjects the common factor is Baker’s mental and shouldered.
physical energy and, one has to say it, his bloody-mindedness. We might cast about for parallels - Turner made comparable
physical demands on himself; he knew the natures of extreme This is vividly expressed in 64 Days when his distant figure
This exhibition, inserted like a ship in a bottle into the domestic and discovered the sublime in creative chaos. ‘I never lose an challenges the slope from the bottom right. In that image he
proportions of the Osborne Studio Gallery, comprises a small accident’, Ruskin heard him say, while the protean Constable is like nobody so much as the brave, lonely and determined
group from the sixty or more Climping landscapes and one tells us that ‘painting is but another word for feeling’. ploughman at the bottom right of Turner’s painting Rain,
eight-footer of Arctic subjects that Baker made in his Sussex Steam, and Speed.
studio following his Cummingøya expedition. While Baker says that, for him, ‘painting is a way of life’, he
adds confusingly ‘but I don’t call myself a painter. I don’t want Christopher Baker may at times be lonely, but his
There is an explosive energy in the Climping canvases where to be in control. I want it to control me.’ A pause is followed by determination to embrace his subjects the hard way is an
even the expression of a quiet day by the sea reveals nerve- a flash of insight which only the line Baker quotes from All’s exemplar of the essential courage of the landscape painter.
racking broody undercurrents. A sudden sunblaze, slapped Well that Ends Well can illuminate: ‘Simply the thing I am shall He demonstrates what is all around us, demanding we look
down during its momentary appearance, can burn the retina. make me live’. at it, and see it, and experience its vitality.

These paintings are neither impressionist nor expressionist, In a moment of revelation in the short film 64 Days, tracking 23 These are not pictures, they are paintings.
but collected ruminations of a contemplative mind caught in a January to 30 March 2012 when he climbed every day up The
restless body. They are offspring of thought and feeling. Trundle, Baker said ‘I’m nothing if not competitive’. James Hamilton