Empty Windows (Jerome, AZ)

Who doesn't love to prowl the streets of Jerome, Arizona ?

It is an arty community about 105 miles north of Phoenix.   

(Born 1949) "Lynn Baker was born in a small town in the Midwest. He later attended a private art school in La Crosse, Wisconsin, and then the Minnesota College of Art and Design. Baker came to the Southwest in January 1973, to accept a fellowship at the Tamarind Institute, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. 

Since that time he has immersed himself in an investigation of the region's land and its heritage. Fascinated by the vast beauty and the ancient, inventive cultures of the Southwest, Baker soon began to explore both the area's physical landscape and the object of his own art. 

Of his work he says, "I believe it must be a synthesis not only of subject and medium, but of me, my interests and my abilities as an artist. When I work, using an image like a polychrome jar, I'm involved not merely in the execution of a motif but in an exploration of all those qualities."

Baker often uses a visual artist's medium such as pottery. About this Baker says, "In the creation of their pottery, the Indians have taken an ordinary utilitarian object and given it great beauty of form and decoration. I use a two-dimensional medium to explore this beauty in an attempt to remove the possibility of response to these objects as decorated jugs. In my lithographs I hope to influence the viewer's perception of the pot as a complex blending of two and three dimensional forms and to expand that perception with my visual statement about the object's intricacy and beauty."”  AskArt.com

Most recently having been represented by Scottsdale gallery Wilde Meyer, Baker's oeuvre relies on his painterly interpretation of scenes around him, those in the Southwest as well as scenes consistent with his time in Wisconsin and beyond.