Aaron Robert Baker is a multidisciplinary artist living in Chicago, IL. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from The University of North Texas, where he studied painting and drawing,...
Aaron Robert Baker is a multidisciplinary artist living in Chicago, IL. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from The University of North Texas, where he studied painting and drawing, and his Master of Fine Arts from the University of Nevada Las Vegas, where he made sculpture and studied under influential art critic Dave Hickey.
When Baker was in the second grade, his teacher told his parents that he had drawn a cheeseburger really well and that they should enroll him in art classes. This was surprising news, but they followed her advice and he has been an artist ever since. His work explores the symmetry between beauty and awkwardness, happiness and despair, the natural and the synthetic. Growth, transformation and anthropomorphization interest him, as does our ability to turn any combination of shapes into a visual language.
In his Heads series, Baker works in a consistent size and format and with a limited visual vocabulary. Beginning with the same egg-shaped outline for each one, he fills it with patterns of circles and lines until a figure emerges. Once a basic structure is in place, he layers in obsessive dots and marks and allows this mark making, and how it looks as it accumulates, to determine whether a shape is on top, underneath, concave, convex, etc. Though his approach is process-based, it is ultimately intuitive. Every artwork is an exploration and he is open to surprises.