Jeffrey T. Baker

My wife and I asked Portland comic artist Jason Rainey to create a bit of Dr. Who fan art as a gift for a family member this Christmas. The only stipulation was that it represent the Weeping Angels and, if possible, contain River Song as well as the good Doctor. Needless to say, we were so thrilled with the result that it was hard to part with it.

This experience got me thinking though. . . thinking back to the days when I devoured comic books as a kid, and to one series in particular that Marvel put out called What If? which essentially explored the possibility of alternate scenarios for different characters and plot lines in their most popular titles. I was thinking about this series because a sort of What If? scenario had tickled my consciousness. Try this one on for size. . .

What if everyone in 2012 decided to commission just one piece of original artwork from an artist to give as a gift next holiday season? Perhaps it wouldn't even need to be related only to commissions. . . what if everyone in 2012 simply decided to purchase one piece or original artwork to give as a gift next holiday season? What sort of neo-Renaissance might occur the world over if everyone simply opted for art rather than designer socks or tiny vials of scented liquid?

Now I realize that the likelihood of such a sea change in the demand for original art is every bit as far fetched as the wildest of What If? stories, but I can say from recent personal experience that the most talked about Christmas present in our family this past season was not a disposable mass-produced product. In fact, the one gift I'm confident will still be around, remembered, and talked about twenty years from now is one that had no middlemen, wasn't shipped or on sale, couldn't be found anywhere else in the world, and cannot be Googled. 

I rarely read fiction. In fact, up until recently I rarely read anything not related to my work, and so have amassed quite a back-log of items on the bookshelf. This holiday season I decided to read Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, which had been repeatedly recommended to me over the years, and in so doing discovered a novel that sought to explore some complex questions about humanity within the framework of a fictitious world.

Here is the gist: In the future a collective of humanoid worlds has formed a cultural alliance knows as the Ekumen* that seeks out and invites other humanoid cultures into the alliance. The invitees are thoroughly studied before the Ekumen sends a lone cultural emissary to make the invitation. On the icy planet of Winter, where every human is simultaneously both genders while being neither, warfare is non-existent despite the fact that there are individual countries and complex hierarchies of respect. In the midst of a tense political climate the lone emissary seeks to understand Winter's culture(s), taboos, and intrigues while working towards convincing the entire planet to accept a role in the vast alliance that exists outside of their world.

Even as I type this I realize just how fantastical this all sounds and it doesn't at all do justice to the philosophical questions that underpin the narrative. What would happen if every woman could also be a man? How would equalizing the role of pregnancy effect the potential for aggression in a society? If no one was ever sexually frustrated how would that effect cultural progress? Is religion a universal need? Is truth?

One of the questions that you sit with for the entire book is the rational behind a huge, highly sophisticated alliance, choosing to send only one emissary to a planet in order to impart the knowledge that the inhabitants of that planet are not alone in the universe. There is a lovely quote near the end of the book that unpacks this idea a bit, which is shared by the emissary with his friend: 

"I thought it was for your sake that I came alone, so obviously alone, so vulnerable, that I could in myself post no threat, change no balance: not an invasion, but a mere messenger-boy. But there's more to it than that. Alone, I cannot change your world. But I can be changed by it. Alone, I must listen, as well as speak. Alone, the relationship I finally make, if I make one, is not impersonal and not only political: it is individual, it is personal, it is both more and less than political. Not We and They; not I and It; but I and Thou. Not political, not pragmatic, but mystical."

A similar unfolding of the mystical also occurs in Le Guin's marvelous A Wizard of Earthsea, where the true name of things holds incredible power, and the author also uses the complexity of religious belief on our world as inspiration for the dreams and demons of the fictions she constructs.

In my mind, a good work of sci-fi is more about reality than fiction. It is a thought experiment not at all dissimilar from those the ancient Greek teachers used to open the minds of their pupils during the Golden Age of western philosophy. In the formulation of a question you are left to consider how that one question is really just a invitation to so many more.


*a word obviously derived from ecumenical, which I've always associated with the body of Christian churches, but more precisely can be defines as belonging to the whole, universal- a word that in itself comes from the Greek word for belonging to the inhabited Earth

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.

Last weekend included a foray to the Oregon Coast; a place that never fails to incite the imagination with its majestic combination of meteorological atmospherics and geologic drama. Like every other visitor to Cannon Beach I succumbed to the dynamic magnetism of Haystack Rock, but I did not allow it to blind my camera to nature's other realities. 

Here then is an utterly unencumbered picture of death the likes of which only a nature outside of human sentiment can conjure.

Nod your head. Tap your foot. There's nothing in the world like harmony.

In 2009 contemporary Icelandic composer Ólafur Arnalds created a composition a day over the course of a week collectively called 'Found Songs.' This suite of compositions has accompanied me more in the studio than perhaps any other, and I can safely attest that these songs have become intrinsically linked with a sort of pensive luminosity that has taken hold in much of my recent imagery. 

To my great excitement, this past week Ólafur released a collection of new songs for free download called 'The Living Room Songs.' They also contain moments of aching beauty and are available (for now) at:

http://livingroomsongs.olafurarnalds.com/

For the past two weekends I've been part of a workshop exploring the new possibilities for printing using large format inkjet printers. At this point I've printed on wood veneer, aluminum flashing, the finest of rice papers, and some exceedingly luxurious clay-coated rag papers.

Like so many people (artists and non-artists alike), I've fought with desktop inkjet printers for years. They constituted a bit of affordable technology that always left me in a perpetual state of disappointment at the muddy prints that resulted. It was hard to even get a bit of text to look crisp, much less a sepia landscape. After this workshop I realize that the days of sub-standard output are gone but, as is true with all things digital, some potential for consternation still remains. 

As the instructor pointed out in the workshop, when things go wrong in the "analog" world (the darkroom for instance) the reaction is often a dogged acceptance in conjunction with a methodical effort to rectify the issue. When things go wrong in a digital lab however, the immediate reactions are: frustration, anger, and blame. Something in our expectation about the ease and convenience of technology make us very unwilling to accept any room for error from our machinery. 

The irony of this stance being (as any IT person is quick to point out) that the vast majority of the time any error that occurs is user error: the machines don't do anything that they aren't instructed to do by the user. While I've fumed at this observation before it is difficult to refute the logic. Ultimately, despite everyone's sub-conscious hope otherwise, the machine you use, be it computer or printer, cannot read your mind and divine your final intention. Instead, there must be a sort of mediated communication that happens between you, the machine, and all of the people involved with the creation of the hardware and software that seeks to facilitate that communication. 

I would hazard to say that as much as any issue in a computer lab may result from user error, an equal amount of responsibility could be given to design error which, ultimately, derives from communication errors between people. A computer programmer may think they know exactly what would be required in the ideal library circulation software (after all, they've used a library before), but this assumption rarely nets an elegant bit of software because it doesn't work with the end-consumer to provide the right tools, structure, and interface. The inability for this fact to be honored and recognized by so many hardware and software companies may speak to some of the inherent arrogance of technological innovation. . . but that is a topic for another time, and the mere fact that this is how today's blog post will end just further supports the observation that, when it comes to difficulties with all things digital the inevitable outcome is blame. That's just human nature.

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

Morning Draught
acrylic, toner, and graphite on panel
24" x 36.25", 2009 — $1,500

In an earlier post I discussed the need for always photographing your work as soon as it was completed. . . this work was, in part, the catalyst for those thoughts, as it was completed in 2009 but not documented until spring of 2011. 

Morning Draught also has the distinction of being one of the few works in the past years that I haven't sealed with cold wax medium. This decision causes me to treat it exceedingly tenderly when I move it around, but I love it all the more for its delicacy. There's a softness to the tones of graphite (which are being held in place by a few layers of Lascaux fixative only) that reveal something very essential about these linear blades of grass.

Pythia's Prospect
acrylic, toner, conté crayon, and wax on panel
6.75" square, 2011 — $330

What began as a process experiment took on a peculiar gravity as I proceeded to obliterate, and then bring back, the wind strewn hiss of a geyser.

I will make the assumption that the source material is from Yellowstone, but that is my default answer for any photo I own that contains geysers (and yes, I have found many more than one such image). Nevertheless, it was the thought of someone holding their head over such a noxious orifice to obtain insight into the fickly nature of gods that most captured my imagination.

Hence the (rather heavy-handed) title.