DAVID BAKER: Artist
David Baker is a realist painter and medical illustrator living and working in San Antonio, Texas since 1995.
Over many years Baker has painted a variety of figurative work ranging from portraiture, figurative landscape, and geologic detail. These varied subject share a common concern for intimate detail combined with formal composition and a realist eye for structure and surface. Influences include French realists of the 19th century, '30s era American realists, and more contemporary figurative painters of the late 20th century.
Fairly recently Baker concentrated on details of classic, homebuilt, and vintage aircraft with special attention to the intersection of surfaces and planes of aircraft materials. The work is an intimate examination of mechanical form and materials, often with interesting plays of light, color, reflection, against the sky beyond.
More recently, Baker has produced expansive views of the Big Bend/Rio Grande area, often with singular foreground elements, a funerary marble, a horse, or a field researcher involved in data gathering.