For the Love of Landscapes

An Interview with David Baker

There’s a magical place when painting the surface of the water,” David Baker says, “where [the surface] switches from mirror to window.” This magic trick was something he spent hours trying to capture during his early years at Ox-Bow. He’d venture out with a canoe on the lagoon, Baker donning a wide brimmed hat to shield himself from the sun and toting a set of paints. While the process might sound romantic, Baker emphasized it was pretty grueling work.

Baker first came to Ox-Bow in the 90’s and reminisced that in those days you could get a cold beer from the campus vending machine. At the time, he mostly rendered abstract oil paintings, the kinds of work that might draw Rothko to mind. All that began to change at Ox-Bow. As if inspired by the school’s founders, he suddenly found himself driven to landscapes, a style he’d previously written off as a “tired genre.”

In the years beyond his first summer at Ox-Bow, Baker continued to expand his practice. He ventured into watercolor, motivated by a class he was to teach at South West Michigan College. Baker eventually brought his professorial skills to campus. He taught his first core course Watercolor in 2000 and continued to do so through 2008. In 2010, he switched gears and crafted his first Art on the Meadow Workshop. Since then, he’s taught community members everything from watercolor to charcoal.

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You can see David’s work (and maybe even take one home!) at Ox-Bow House this spring: June 13-24