BIO

Aaron Robert Baker was born in the Allegheny Mountains of western Pennsylvania in 1972. The youngest in a tribe of restless people, he wandered though Michigan, Ohio, Nevada and numerous Texas towns before settling in Chicago, IL, with his wife and son.  

He received his BFA from The University of North Texas and his MFA from The University of Nevada Las Vegas, where he studied under influential art critic Dave Hickey. When he was in the second grade, his teacher told his parents that he had drawn a cheeseburger really well and they should enroll him in art classes. He has been an artist ever since.

My work explores the symmetry between beauty and awkwardness, happiness and despair, the natural and the synthetic. Growth, transformation and anthropomorphism interest me, as does our ability to turn any combination of shapes into a visual language. 

In my "Heads" series, I work in a consistent size and format and with a limited visual vocabulary. Beginning with the same egg-shaped outline for each one, I fill it with patterns of circles and lines until a figure emerges. Once a basic structure is in place, I layer in obsessive dots and marks and allow this mark making, and how it looks as it accumulates, to determine whether a shape is on top, underneath, concave, convex, etc. Though my approach is process-based, it is ultimately intuitive. Every artwork is an exploration and I am open to surprises