By Lauren Kane | Co-Editor-in-Chief –
her·met·ic (adj):
- closed tightly so that no air can go in or out
- impervious to external influence
- recluse, solitary
Thus is how the newest installation in the Dorrance Hamilton Gallery defines itself. The pieces on display in the gallery are a sampling of the large collection that local Newport painter James Baker has acquired over 50 years. Woven in with the pieces of his collection are Baker’s own paintings. Meant to emulate his own studio space, which he refers to by the same name, the works are a portion of Baker’s life’s work
Baker’s own work speaks very much to a Rothko influence; largely experiential, colossal swatches of color, with subtle accents. His work also bridges painting and the feel of multimedia, painting vibrant stencils overs a milky grey, or a series of twelve prints depicting “hubris disastrously aligned with technology and nature”.
His original work also includes 6 paintings studying a lone rock at Hazard Beach, examined and painted in different light. While Monet’s series of wheat stacks offers a little more range, and feel a bit more finished, the attention to more traditional practices in painting is so exciting to see. An in-depth study of the fleeting nature of light harkens back to a level of realism that is so very often lost (or dismissed) in contemporary work.
The pièce de résistance in his collection is a very unassuming photograph hung just to the right when you enter the gallery. It’s a barren landscape with the silhouette of a man in a bowler in the middle-distance. This 8.5”x11” photograph was taken by painter Rene Magritte in 1934, and is entitled “Virtue Rewarded”, though Baker’s notes describe it as “The Solitary Observer” (one cannot ignore the shift in meaning created by the painters’ differing perspectives). The small photograph was taken almost 30 years before his famous “Son of Man”, but those bowler hats certainly link hands across the decades.
In continuing interest for the fans of the surreal/absurd movements of the early twentieth century, a handwritten postcard from Samuel Beckett (famous for his two-act tragicomedy “Waiting for Godot”) hangs amongst photos of Paris, in Baker’s words, “the poetry of place held in the amber of time.”
The guide for the gallery, two pages of black type on plain computer paper, provides the numbers that correspond to each work, and have an added nuance – a sentence of description, oftentimes poetically written, by Baker.
The piecemeal collection comes together in a graceful way. Moving from his Meditation paintings to a vibrantly colored Madonna figure, from Magritte’s photograph to a map of the Paris metro, one feels that the they are getting a whole impression of what Baker’s art means to him.
The exhibit closes on Thursday January 19. Hamilton Gallery is open Tue/Thu 11-6, Wed/Fri 11-5, and Sat/Sun 12-4.
