That Charming Baker GQ article in full...

THIS CHARMING MAN By Sophie Hastings

Charming Baker's art is beautiful and unnerving, and his private views are rock'n'roll. Held in edgy, industrial locations - London's Truman Brewery and Redchurch Street, the New York Studio Gallery on the Lower East Side, and the Carmichael Gallery in downtown Los Angeles - they heave with gorgeous young things, there's a DJ pumping out club music, a proper bar (rather than the dreary beer and bad wine so prevalent at cool gallery openings) and red dots abound - the collectors have already been in to snap up several works apiece.

His New York show drew Damien Hirst, Alberto Mugrabi (owner of the world's largest Andy Warhol collection) and British collector Frank Cohen, each of whom bought in bulk. Baker's forthcoming London show, this July, in which he will exhibit 16 paintings and 20 sculptures, will be in Soho with an after-party at the Groucho Club. And yet this self-deprecating, forty-something Yorkshireman, whose paintings now fetch up to £40,000 apiece, seems to have appeared from nowhere and success is still taking him by surprise. After all, he doesn't have a gallery and, "I don't have a plan," he tells me, perched on a long table in his cavernous Deptford studio. "I always wanted to paint, but as a working-class lad, I didn't know what work painting would give you."

Having left school at 15 to work as a road digger, Baker came to London aged 21 and "sneaked onto the graphic design course at Central St Martins. Fine art didn't appeal to me, seeing them in their little boxes painting away. I liked the design sensibility; I didn't want to be a graphic designer, but the course seemed more open-spirited - our workspace was open-plan, we made a film, took photos, and it was a tighter-knit community."

After graduation, Baker worked as a teacher at St Martins and did other odd jobs while continuing to paint at home, then an ex-council flat in southeast London. His penchant for painting his backgrounds with patterns like pieces of fabric links directly to his graphic-design training, but the people, animals and objects placed on the backdrops are utterly painterly. Full of movement, often blurred, like captured moments in time, they're jarring and emotional, even more so in their proximity to the conventional repetition behind. The work is sometimes dark, usually humorous and the titles are sharp and clever: a bull's head writhes on the centre of the canvas while a slightly fuzzy bullfighter grapples with its body in "I See Things I Don't Want To Be In People I Like The Most"; a boy appears to be plummeting to his death, midair, in "Falling Boy (The Descent Into Mediocrity)"; a woman lies with her back to us, her half-laced corset falling open, a target and bullet hole on her bottom, in "A Conversation Piece (Shot In The Arse)".

Perhaps because he began by painting on boards, often drilled with holes, from skips and builders' sites, Baker's work has something of the street about it, but he refutes any connection with urban art. "Much of my technique comes from working on those boards, but the subject matter is something else," he says. "I'm not trying to claim the street: I don't mind it and I don't mind galleries, either, I'd just rather drink in a pub than a VIP lounge."

The subjects he's obsessed with, he says, are sex and death, "like most artists". And like most artists, he has come to realise that he's been painting the same painting all his life. "Of course themes change, but the concept doesn't." He sometimes shoots or drills holes in his paintings because it amuses him as an anti-painting stance, and he's interested in the dichotomies of existence: "I don't have the words to explain the joy and terror in life, the way they coexist."

Somehow, graffiti-art collector Tim Fennell heard of Baker and turned up at the flat like a fairy godfather. "He bought five pieces that were piled under my bed," says Baker, and offered to put on a show at the Truman Brewery. "Twenty paintings, and they all sold." Fennell, now his "day-to-day manager", helped Baker put together some online publicity and one of America's most successful music business managers, Pat Magnarella (Green Day, Goo Goo Dolls), liked what he saw. He bought two from Baker's small LA show, and flew to London to meet the artist. "He came to my studio and bought two more pieces," says Baker. "He took me out to dinner and said, 'What do you want? How can I help?' Running bands didn't fire him up any more. He saw art could be his new band and he took a chance. I was only selling for £3,000 a picture. It wasn't commercial work."

Magnarella paid for PR for Baker's 2009 Redchurch Street show, "did his networking, got good people down. We could feel the excitement and it sold out." By the time the New York exhibition opened in 2010, hyped by Magnarella's music-business publicity machine, Baker was red hot, and prices had risen to between £12,000 and £16,500: "Someone told me later that Tim could have sold the entire show to a collector even before they'd seen the work. It was all so out of the blue. It was the show I had to get VAT registered."

The next London Art Fair heralded a new high: "When Tim texted me to say I'd sold a rabbit painting for 40k, my wife and I sat in silence. There was nothing to say. Now I'm that cliché - I can't afford my own art." He has finally conceded that his studio is a necessity rather than a luxury - he sometimes works in a studio at the end of his garden - and closets himself there for two months before a show. He is tidy, only using five tubes of paint at a time, laid out on an antique glass trolley, paint knives in a row beside them; on the table sits a pile of cuttings from Seventies magazines. "I'm inspired by old photos. There's a joy in finding something with odd details, a piece of tape or a shadow across a hand. Those are the things I'll use."

He also leaves the studio for inspiration. "I've been going to the Natural History Museum in Tring. It's full of corpses of extinct animals. And I found a woman with 200 rabbits, so I went to tea and photographed them." And he often paints or takes moulds of his children; between them, he and his wife have five.

The corollary to his overly controlled working environment is a loss of control in other areas, namely swearing and drinking. "I went to my daughter's school the other day to talk to the sixth form art group and opened with, 'My wife said, 'Don't swear and, whatever you do, don't say "c***".' I've got social Tourette's, that's why I can't drink in posh places." But Charming is as Charming does, and later on he phones me to check I've got home all right from the depths of darkest Deptford. The fact that his real name is Alan in no way undermines his natural charm and, true to his Northern roots, you can pick up a print for £250 off the internet. I'm there.


charmingbaker.com

great article.

Prints or originals; have to be mint and unframed, and reasonably priced

Cheers

Cheers mothegrass but I picked up a Perfect Vacuum from source

Half Pint NYC available

Looks like this:

no one should, its all smoke and mirrors, art bought to resell, never intended to make the wall.

Not only that, it's 'hypothesis'.....which by it's own admission is an assumption?

You know what they say about assumptions.

Anyhow I know I shouldn't comment on other peoples prices and I usually don't but this one seemed too rude, apologies but I could not hold back.

Can't wait.

... and the Telegraph (it looks like his PR team is kicking into gear):

www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/8591440/Charming-Baker-the-artist-who-shot-to-fame.html

Can't wait for this show...

nice piece on Charming Baker in the daily torygraph mag today

Yeah this'll be a cracker, looking forward to it.

Thread already argie

urbanartassociation.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=charmingbaker&thread=84481&page=1#837652