John Baker’s Collage Paintings: The Aesthetic Possibilities
Rather than having a conceptual purpose (that might very well be better or more appropriately articulated in words than in painting!) my goal as a painter is straightforward and timeless: to create, in the visual/emotional sense, very good paintings! In the service of this goal, in addition to accomplishing some of the actual painting myself, I appropriate pieces from found paintings. So, my collage paintings are collective efforts, accomplished by myself and by the painters whose works I appropriate. I want the kinds of advantages Peter Paul Rubens gained for his artistic efforts by employing a large team of assistant painters in his workshop: time advantages and energy advantages that enhance the prospects for the prolific creation of large scale, extremely complex works. But my process is not merely similar to 17th Century Flemish and Dutch workshop practices, in which collective authorship was a commonplace for the sake of productivity. In the 17th Century workshops seamless uniformity of style was the only acceptable (indeed the only imaginable) outcome of collective authorship. But in my work, I explore and develop in the opposite aesthetic direction: within the boundaries set by coherence, I look to allow variety to speak between the different hands I choose for inclusion. In this sense my collage paintings are like visual choruses in which there is a richness of texture, of gesture and color choice and density, of emotional meaning and evocation, that no one voice could achieve. In another, secondary, sense, this shifting and variety in my work is true to the reality of life experience, with its endlessly changing, and sometimes discontinuous, moments.
I believe it is extremely promising aesthetically/expressively to separate pieces of found paintings from their limitations in their original contexts. Liberated from their intended artistic function (and any “failure” to work in relation to the original artists’ intentions) these pieces are free to take on my newly imagined purposes for them and be far more successful in relation to their belonging in my collage.
There is also another aesthetic/perceptual advantage to the constant shifts in the styles of representation. The continual shifting not only promotes the pictorial virtue of freshness; it also pre-empts the possibility of the viewer focusing on any one style and from there considering its general limitations. Not allowing the viewer to “get through” the representation to a critical or skeptical look at the style in which it was achieved keeps focus more on the represented and less on such academic issues as skill, degree of realism and polish.
Characters and Personalities: Recent Collage Paintings by John Baker
In these works the focus is on faces that are reminiscent of the “impossibilities” in Magritte’s images. What is at issue here, as often in Magritte’s Surrealism, is optical illusion. However, my optical illusions have psychological content. The collaged components of the faces are appropriated from different source paintings and are sufficiently discordant to stand together expressively for tenuously integrated fragments of personality, incoherences of mood, or otherwise precariously organized aspects of the inner and outer self. In this way I have created a new possibility for the relationship between materials and meaning in collage.
The spatial positions of the collaged pieces shift, like optical illusions, in relation to the perceptual organization found for them by the viewer. Next to and behind mask-like halves of faces lurk inner selves that seem to move forward as the eye of the spectator integrates the two sides into a synthesized face. These “inner self” components then retreat spatially as the face begins once again to break apart. Often slight scale discrepancies between the two sides contribute to these illusions, the larger half advancing (as the mask, or aspect of the self most usually presented to the world) and the smaller half receding (as the withheld, or less-often-appearing aspect of the self).
One is reminded of the psychoanalytic observations that understand personality as an accretion of more or less imperfect incorporations of other selves. And here is the perfect match between my process and the content of my work: the assembling of the collages recapitulates the accretion of components in personality just as the completed images resemble cobbled together selves!!
Technically and procedurally, much of the actual painting I accomplish in these works takes place along the seams between collaged pieces. It is necessary to make the disparate facial components appear to belong coherently to an integrated image, just as everyone endeavors to present themselves to the world of others as someone whose self makes sense. But I do not try to make the seams disappear altogether, for this would minimize or even obliterate the psychical intensity of the works by excessive blending.
The characters and personalities are neither just realistic descriptions of the actual appearance of faces nor just ideographic hypotheses about the nature of personality. They are both simultaneously, in order to compel in two ways: by the credibility of their naturalistic resemblance and by their plausibility as ideas describing the chaos within innumerable personalities in the world.
Historically, much of even the best collage has failed to create more than easy-to-achieve disjunctions and incongruities. But I believe that my work has moved beyond this limit to new visual articulations of the complexity and fragmentation of the self.