Jeffrey T. Baker

In coordination with many a talented maker (see list below) at the historic Troy Laundry Artist's Studio Co-Op, I will be throwing wide the studio doors on the 2nd and 3rd of December to share works-in-progress and (hopefully) sell some past work. Please tell your friends, join me for a bit of refreshment, and take some time to enjoy the creative efforts of fifteen artists on two levels of this fantastic old Portland laundry building.

Just two works currently in process at the studio. . . 

Opening your studio to the public is fraught with complication. 

The first, and most pressing problem, is that the studio is not set up for the public. Storing your staple gun and glass cleaner on the lowest shelf makes perfect sense until you have toddlers running around your space. Your walls are a repository for work in progress, not a neutral (or even particularly clean) space for the presentation of finished work. Ultimately, the act of making the studio suitable for company automatically renders it unsuitable for working— a bit of a conundrum since people are, one assumes, coming to see a bit of the artist in their "natural habitat."

Furthermore (and this is really the hardest part for me as an artist), it is odd to be so exposed. When you work in isolation for so long you come to accept the faults and little journeys each work takes as it moves towards completion. You have a relationship with the locations of objects, and there is meaning in how the space is arranged that is deeply personal. To throw open your doors is to invite in a public with no context as to why this drawing is always put down next to this drawing on the worktable, or why all the lights are oriented towards a blank portion of wall. There are stories there, and they are personal, and you think about them being encountered with great brevity and a paucity of background information and you start to feel a bit self conscious. 

When I went to bed last night I thought about the first few lines of one of my favorite poems. It is titled Open House, and is written by the American poet Theodore Roethke. It illuminates, with an admirable simplicity, what I've been trying for express for the last three paragraphs:

My secrets cry aloud.
I have no need for tongue.
My heart keeps open house,
My doors are widely swung.

That's right people— here's a chance to see a considerable amount of work in progress by yours truly as well as visit a labyrinth of studios filled with everything from mask-makers to video artists.

Please note that I will only be participating on Friday night as Saturday needs to be set aside for continuing to work on the upcoming OCAC show. Nevertheless, I do hope you can stop by to chat and give me some feedback.

The address is 221 SE 11th Ave and I'm in Studio 10 on the upper (3rd) floor. The studio is just two blocks off Burnside, at the famously difficult to navigate Burnside/Sandy intersection.

In the studio with great regularity now to prepare for a show in May. The past three days have included:

-making a bruise of the sky
-structuring a new website and blog
-cutting small panels to fit a selection of found frames
-reacquainting myself with the leafing process
-freeing my fingers of fingerprints 
-pleading with the Burnt Umber
-pulling paint
-erasing away the unforeseen traces
-writing a press release

And now I am just waiting for the snow to fall.