Charming Baker is somewhat of an anomaly in the world of contemporary art, painting is his bread and butter, and I’m sure he wouldn’t describe himself as an urban or street artist, however his attitude to subject, composition and treatment of the canvas owes a lot to the rise of the graffiti arts movement, however philosophical the point, it’s unavoidable.

Charming Baker has a healthy disrespect for the arts establishment and its traditions, turning mainstream convention and propriety on its head in order to create a subjectively juxtaposed space for the viewer to inhabit. His background is again rather traditional, a UK artist born in the North, and graduating at the prestigious Central Saint Martins College of Art in London, he now works from his studio in South London in traditional mediums including oil on canvas, linen, wood and paper.

However his work is as shocking and surprising as any established street artist of acclaim, in fact at times rather jaw-dropping. His subject matter varies between hometown suburbia, family portraits, wild animals, and the staid mainstream portraiture of 20th Century Britain. The familiarity of his choices juxtaposes with a unique and somewhat unhinged frame of mind, on many occassions capturing the briefest moment of confusion afore an ensuing state of panic that is dutifully delivered by most participants in the British sociology, the cultral and concious collective that ensures the continuance of (at the very least) a semblance of "normality".

I think the best analogy I can make with Charming Alan Baker’s work is thus:- a horror film that can without violence or gore, be shot in the middle of the day before a highly familiar and somewhat uninspiring backdrop, and still manage to unnerve the audience on a deep and intrinsic emotional level, is for the lack of a better description, a sign of oncoming genius. Not a word to be bandied around I concur, but still to be able to both engage an audience of one mindset to immediately shift to another without purpose or intent, and at the same time hold their attention without extravagant gesture or definitive iconography, that has to be the sign of a superior mind.

Still, Charming Baker is an affable and at times self-deprecating character, his works speak for themselves, he takes a backstage when it comes to the deep and at times convoluted analysis of his art. Amusingly enough he has even described his online portfolio as "the art world’s shonkiest website". This self-deprecation and ability to laugh at the absurdity of the world around him, as well as the imaginary divide between it and the world of art, has set him in good stead to express his particular view of life and everything it contains with pith, irony and a general distrust of the informed consensus of what amounts to the contemporary age and all that it entails.

The Over Achievers (oil on linen)
 

Half Pint (print)

Falling Boy (The Descent Into Mediocrity) oil on linen

Group Shot (oil on wood)

Some have described a similarity between Charming Baker’s work and David Hockney, both can paint till the cows come home, I will agree there, however I feel that Charming has pushed the boundaries of subject matter far further, his talent for insinuation is both subtle and sublime. What’s more his habit of leaving areas unfinished and unpainted is extremely intriguing, to the degree that I feel a reference to abstract expressionism maybe hovering around in the background, in effect a buffer system, the boy isn’t falling to his death, it’s merely a painting, he won’t hit the glass table, it’s merely oil paint, gesticulated upon a bed of linen, nothing more.

Yet still these and many other pieces by the artist reverberate with some other-worldly grim fortitude that one expects when rifling through old photos, snapshots of other lives unknown and for us personally, incomplete. The spectre of death does arise in many of the works although it is manoeuvred in a highly subjective and constricted form, something in which to weigh against the purpose of meaning, or the brute force of the will to survive over the conceptual longing of relativity, a simulucrum of the mundane struck dumb by the immediate and misunderstood "now". Capturing all times with a single moment, unexplained and for many misconstrued, for prosperity and for all.

I’ve included a video of one of his latest shows, if you watch closely and know what Rob Gunningham (aka Banksy) looks like you might see him wandering around there. It seems that Charming Baker has some highly esteemed fans in the world of graffiti.

Charming Baker at the Truman Brewery in Brick Lane, London

Charming has exhibited around the world from New York Art Directors Club (NYC), Pentagram, Cargo, Truman Brewery (London), Opus (Newcastle), White Walls (San Francisco), to Cork St Gallery, Signal Gallery (London), and the Carmichael Gallery Of Contemporary Art (LA).You can buy prints of his work (when available) at his website www.charmingbaker.com and ArtRepublic.com.

This post is tagged Brick Lane, Carmichael Gallery, Charming Baker, charmingbaker.com, contemporary art, Hockney, painter, painting, Signal, St. Martins, UK art, White Walls