One Hundred Percent Rag: The Poetry of Observation

Monday, March 25, 2013

The Poetry of Observation

Claire Anna Baker

SunBody
Paintings- Ink on polyester

March 16- April 27, 2013

Edward Cella Art & Architecture
6018 Wilshire Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90036
323-525-0053
Tues-Sat: 11-6 pm /by appt.
director@edwardcella.com

Strings of Desire 2013 -54"x92" (ink on polyester)

The artist talks that director Edward Cella and curator Carl Berg provided on Saturday March 23, 2013 for Claire Anna Baker and Steven Schmidt is a tribute to the emergence of supporters like Cella and Berg to promote the relevance of artists extending their works in dialogues with viewers, art students, artists, patrons and devotees.

During artist talks many artists have been known to create pieces of performance art during their presentations. Such was the case with Claire Anna Baker. SunBody portrays Baker's jubilance and rejoicing in the process of making art. Baker beamingly delivered her process which was nurtured in a poetic womb papered with stories of art and artists. Baker referenced The Life of Poetry by Muriel Rukeyser, as one of her main inspirations for this series. She sentimentally read heartfelt excerpts from her personally worn book. Baker praised and appaulded her poet- mother for introducing The Life of Poetry to her in childhood. For Baker " poetry causes negotiating with the self. "

Baker's "negotiating" included influences by artists like Helen Frankenthaler and Franz Kline. She spoke of how Kline's gestural paintings were influenced from real life. Baker also references real life by having a massive quantity of thrown and stacked objects in the center of her studio. This intentional conglomerate is her quasi-still life.

Baker has found that painting on polyester, for this series, aids in achieving her process of bold ink gestures traveling throughout the canvas. She said that "polyester has a memory". In Strings of Desire the signal wave of motion appears to carry with it memories of Baker's observations and the time of their conceptions. The subtle layers of the gesture are form and shadow. The viewer can experience Baker's thought process from its inception to the end of the gestural dance.

Thomas Edison felt that our world was being "observed". As he looked in his microscope he believed he could keep our world afloat by performing the same gesture. Baker is an observer, who transcribes her world through movement in various periods of time.