The application process for an artist’s residency at Sebastian’s recently created nonprofit Stouthouse is simple, according to Kyle Baker: Be at the right place at the right time.
When one of his pieces was accepted the Appleton Museum of Art’s Drawing Biennial, Baker traveled from Nashville to Ocala for the show’s July 11 reception. An unassuming sort, he reluctantly pinned on a nametag before entering the packed gallery.
In no time, he had been discovered by – who else? – Quentin Walter, a multiple award-winning Vero-based artist who has a habit of zeroing in on interesting people at gatherings. She is also the founder of Stouthouse and searching for a new resident artist.
“Quentin comes up and starts talking to me, as you know she does very well. Next thing I know, she invited me down here,” says Baker in a matter-of-fact way.
Later this month, on Nov. 26, Baker’s paintings will be on display at a fundraiser for Stouthouse at Walking Tree Brewery in Vero.
The 23-year-old artist graduated in May with a BFA from Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro. Already, his works have been shown in more than a dozen exhibitions in museums and galleries, and featured in three publications, including Nashville Arts magazine. Last year, his eerie drawing of two drifters, “Powell Street Lurkers,” was a finalist for the Williams Prize in Drawing for Emerging Artists, awarded by a Simsbury, Conn., advocacy group known as McWilliams Francisco. The judge was an instructor at the Art Students League and New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
Baker draws people in graphite on paper, and has very recently begun to paint them in oil on canvas.
Stouthouse is located in the former home of the late Sebastian artist Weldon Stout, who near the end of his life became Walter’s husband, and provides his room and board and a studio space to work in for two months, as well as a small stipend. He began his residency in late September and will continue it through the first week of December depending, he says, on how much art work he has to finish up.
Walter, meanwhile, has crowded into a small office in the airy home, tucked on the side of a heavily wooded cul de sac near the Indian River Lagoon. Governed by a six-member board of directors, Stouthouse remains Walter’s reason for being – she is artistic director of the program. The space is also her own studio; a visual and performance artist known not only for her outsider-style paintings, collages, and mixed media works, but also for her public appearances, often in imaginative costumes, at art events from Miami to New York.
The residency came as a relief to Baker, who was working a 60-hour week as a photographer with Lifetouch, a company that creates school photos. That did not leave much time to make art, though he tried to sketch from a life model once or twice a week.
“I’m trying to keep the ball rolling, which is something that I’ve heard is hard to do,” he says of life after art school.
That’s why his stay at Stouthouse has been important to him.
“I didn’t really paint in college,” Baker says. At Stouthouse he has done nothing but painting. Midway through his stay he has all but completed one portrait and is working on two others, including a 4-by-6-foot double portrait. He’s also done a whimsical still life.
While still an art student, Baker gained local notice for his drawings, all portraits of friends and acquaintances. Done in graphite, he set the figures against the paper’s white void to focus on the human drama in each subject.
One that drew considerable praise was a life-size depiction of a street preacher named Johnny. An elderly man with the beard of an Old Testament prophet, Johnny is shown seated on an invisible curb with his stubby legs out stretched. Squinting into the sun, he holds his open Bible before him and gestures with his free hand toward God’s word.
In a 2015 interview at his college’s TV station, Baker said his goal in choosing down-at-the-heel subjects like Johnny was to “find a way to give the downtrodden some celebrity for five minutes.” He later recreated the drawing as an oil on canvas.
In re-envisioning his themes in oil, Baker has taken to lightly sketching his figures onto canvas. He uses photographs and a digital projector and then colors them in, using layer after layer of translucent colors in a technique known as “glazing.”
“I used to not like glazing until I went to the Rijksmuseum (in Amsterdam),” says Baker. “I saw ‘Meagre Company’ by Frans Hals – it’s got like 14 figures in it.”
That vast painting of a company of be-ruffed 17th century Dutch militiamen and their haughty commander was painted using a fluid paste of paint applied over a white ground. The colors in the faces and some parts of the clothing were then heightened with applications of glaze.
Returning to the states, Baker developed his own version of Hals’ technique. His recently completed “Holding Court” depicts a louche-looking man seated on a rocker in a cut-off black T-shirt and cuffed jeans, his muddy boots exposed. On his crossed leg rests a scoped rifle.
The model was a friend of Baker’s from childhood named Parker Ratliff.
“He’s from Tennessee, and he’s kind of a backwoods guy. He’s a country boy,” says Baker. Ratliff’s predilection for taking on tough jobs (like salmon fishing in Alaska) made Baker want to “immortalize” him.
Baker says that there is no particular reason his friend is posed with a gun. Ratliff, he says, doesn’t hunt, and the artist himself is not “a big gun person.” He can’t even remember if it was his idea or Ratcliff’s to include the gun.
“I don’t think of painting as a way to facilitate political ideas,” says Baker. “If I get an idea for a painting, that’s okay. But I try not to paint based on ideas.”
Baker says his works are typically abstract arrangements devoid of subjective meaning.
“So you can kind of almost play with people’s judgments,” he says.
Tickets for the Walking Tree Brewery event can be purchased online or at the door on Nov. 26.
