RM Baker is not an artist.  He cannot draw and does not paint.  Baker has no formal training in artistic techniques or composition.  What he does appear to have is a broad knowledge of Greek and Roman mythology, childhood memories of Bible stories as related in the King James version of the Old and New Testaments, an acquaintance with the martyrdom of the Catholic saints from wandering through Italy's museums and churches and a slightly twisted imagination.

Lacking any innate artistic talent, Baker turned to collage, piecing together other people's images from photos in magazines, book illustrations and odd pieces of junk mail.  He begins with acid-free watercolor paper, rubber cement, a sharp Exacto knife blade and a pile of pictures, sometimes ripped from magazines in dentists' offices, on airplanes and in motel rooms.

Each collage is made up of the fewest individual cutouts possible.  Excluding a few early works, most of Baker's collages are constructed by pasting only one or two other pieces of paper onto the background photo.

The resulting absence of a sense of scale and formal perspective is reminiscent of the 12th Century works of such Medieval masters as Giotto and Giovanni di Paola. Baker's work also evokes the mystic naturalism permeated with symbolic meaning of early Nederlandish painters like Rogier van der Wyden, along with the physicality and emotional excess of artists like Mattias Grunewald and the scrupulous decorative sense of Gentile da Fabriano. Baker himself names Pieter Bruegel the Elder's "The Fall of Icarus" as an inspiration for some of his collages on the same theme.

On the other hand, a lot of Baker's work appears to be pretty random and even the basic craftsmanship of cutting and pasting can be fairly shoddy.

rmbake13@gmail.com