Adrian Baker - Putting the Extra in the Ordinary
By Sally Hansen

"Powerful" was the first word that popped into my head when I entered Adrian Baker's home in Appleton and first saw her art. "Beautiful" was the second. Baker had positioned a collection of large acrylic portraits of women all around her living room to show me her recent series on "Women's Work". This artist draws superbly. And her paintings are even better. She actually makes good on her artistic statement: "My intention is to enable the observer to see beyond the familiar and witness the extraordinary in the ordinary".

Her representational treatment of the commonplace (a woman hanging up clothes, another bending over in her garden, a mother nursing her baby, a husband supporting his wife in labour, a midwife on the floor assisting at a birth, an infant tucked along his mother's side) evokes a range of emotions. I felt an instant sense of self-identification, of sympathy, of pleasure and of pain. And without being told, I knew that Adrian Baker is reflecting her own contradictory feelings about the sacrifices and rewards that motherhood entails.

She confirmed my intuition when she responded to my comment about the piece she is currently completing (photographed with her on her Artist Trading Card). I remarked that the nursing mother appeared pensive, almost sad. "Trapped", replied Adrian. "I experienced that feeling many times when I put my artistic career on hold to raise my three children."

Fast Forward
Motherhood may have slowed her down, but this high-energy woman is a triathlon competitor whose concept of "slow" moves along at a very brisk pace. In 1983 one of her paintings adorned the front cover of the Canadian Medical Association Journal, and in 1995 another appeared on the back cover of the Reader's Digest. In between she has exhibited her work at a myriad of juried shows, had solo shows in Oakville and Carp, and been invited to participate in area group shows and artists' studio tours.

Baker is an accomplished portrait artist as well; in 1984 the Young Liberal Party awarded her a commission to paint a portrait of then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and his three sons as a retirement gift. Several patrons have commissioned a series of family portraits, and she is also well-known locally for her paintings of murals. She is hard at work completing the last of four large exterior murals commissioned by Malik Zekry for the 7 West Café/Restaurant on Hwy #7 in Carleton Place.

Perpetual Motion
When she was just a little girl on a farm in Huntingdon in the Eastern Townships, her family dubbed Adrian "the Artist". They later moved to Oakville, and Adrian proved them right by earning highest honours when she received her Fine Arts Diploma from the Central Technical School. She became Assistant Art Director of the Harbourfront Corporation in Toronto until she left to realise her life-long ambition of cycling across Canada. Perhaps it was running into Terry Fox on his cross-country mission that helped her decide to pursue her true ambition to be an artist. She moved to a cabin in the Laurentians and began painting.

Adrian moved to eastern Ontario in 1981 with her husband, Robert Cretien, to be closer to her family. They lived in a number of rural communities in the area before settling in Appleton and raising a family. Meanwhile, her paintings sold, and she found opportunities to travel in Spain, Mexico and Guatemala to photograph and draw gypsies and indigenous people in traditional costume. Ever since school she has augmented her income by working as an art instructor, and she continues to teach at schools, art societies, and summer art camps like kefferkamp in Almonte.

Along the way she acquired a reputation as an excellent portrait painter, and accepts commissions to do portraits of people and their pets. Her paintings and coloured pencil drawings of animals are superb. "Growing up on a farm I developed a love for animals, and became a keen observer of their anatomy." I don't know how she acquired her knowledge of the anatomy of mountain lions and moose and bighorns, but her drawings prove that she has it. Her popular wildlife and animal portraits are often done in coloured pencil, a medium she found much more amenable to the demands of raising three children than fast-drying acrylic paints!

Baker truly believes that her work must be the product of her vision instead of being dictated to by the market. She continues to use a direct and minimalist representational style to interpret the underlying complexity of the familiar. She showed me two of her new series, an exploration of the vulnerability and exposure of women in our society. This new body of work promises to fulfill another of her stated artistic goals: "My end desire is for my representational work to convey more than meets the physical eye; to invite the viewer to challenge the prescripts inherent when accepting judgement on the commonplace…"
It occurs to me that Baker's art provides the perfect antidote for viewers numbed into passive receptivity by commercial television fare and stressed by ubiquitous email. Her art makes you think and feel. Smelling the roses is good, but thinking and feeling can be extraordinary.

While Adrian Baker arranges her next exhibition, click here to see why you should watch for her works at local galleries and area studio tours. If you wish to accept her invitation to challenge your prescripts, give her a call at 257-4233 or contact her by email at <appletonstudio@sprint.ca>. Christmas will be here in only six and a half months, so clip her Artist Trading Card at the top of this printed page, or add this web page to your browser's "favorites" as an aide memoir.