artists register

Stephen Baker


The Godalming Water Wheel 1

The Godalming Water Wheel 1

The sgraffito river is dissected by the artificial water channel shown by the geometric pattern of flow. The upper tablet shows the electrified town. The water wheel has intermediate prominence.

Acrylic ink on prepared paper
58cm x 41cm

Statement

 

  

 My ideas and art practice are based on four cornerstones:-

The Invocatory: The meaning in the flow of appearances has to be invoked - either by will or by a rule.

The Hallucinatory: What is there does not look like how we see it; 

The Monadic: The world is not arranged in the pattern of the objects that we see - It is a geometrical matrix of infinite dimensions.  

The Charged Ego: Moving through the world is - the unit in space, the monad in the matrix.

 The components of these ideas:-

 Artistic                The idea ruler          Time sequence

The point                  Dr Dee                       1950 - 1968

Colour                      Various                      1968-1975

The line                    G.W.Leibniz               1978-2008

The mark                  Paul Klee                   2008 - present

Biography

 I was born in 1950 in the midlands. As a child I played in the abandoned infrastructure of the industrial past:- quarries, canals, ash mounds, huge derelict factories with rusting chains whose links were bigger than me. These experiences have shaped my artistic sensibilities.

I spent six years at various art colleges. My Fine art degree course was at Newport College of Art, in South Wales. There I encountered Welsh mythology.

I worked as an art teacher for a short time but teaching was not for me. I spent thirty years as a Chartered Surveyor. This gave me the world of structures, schematic depiction, measurement, as well as the world of numbers and calculation.

In 2008, I became a full time artist. I am developing my private visual language, which incorporates all of these things.