Local Artist Sheds Light on Life and Her Influences

Alison Baker, Takoma Park artist and teacher, has taught me art history for about two years now. I decided to do this interview because she has been a great motivator and inspiration for me and my classmates, and I feel like more people should know about her.

Q:What motivated you to become an artist?
A: Well, that's so long ago I can barely remember! I've always been doing art. Ever since I was a little kid, I just always had to have my hands busy. Busy with stuff. So whether it was trying to, at like, age 5, sew little costumes for my dolls, or in high school, make all the banners for the Glee club... I've just always done it. Always had to.

Q: Did you always know you wanted to be an artist?
A: Nope! In fact, when I was in college, I had a teacher who said, “Never become an artist.” He was implying that women never can be true artists. It was back in the day. So I stopped doing art for quite some time, thinking “oh, I can't do art.” His words were a big discouragement.

But I'm glad I've become an artist. I do a lot of other things, too, it's just part of my personality, part of who I am. It has to come out. I can't stop it. In graduate school, at the end of my college career, I decided that art therapy would be an interesting discipline to study, because I loved psychology, so I carved my own major as an undergraduate, which was in art therapy. I read everything about it, and kind of blended that with my work in psychology.

I was going to go to graduate school in art therapy until I realized that the only jobs at the time – the 70's – in art therapy would have been in children's hospitals. I knew that I absolutely could not cope with dying children. It was just too much. So I just went to regular graduate school in counseling psychology at American University.

[Then] I stopped doing art for a while, for the most part... I think I started painting again because I just had to when my kids were born. When they were young, I used to not sleep at all, so in the middle of the night I'd just get my stuff out and start painting. When my kids got to be a little older, I'd take them to Sligo Creek park, and they'd play around and I'd paint.

Q: What motivated you to go on and teach art?
A: I guess, probably like many people, I have a lot of things that are interesting to me, and I never could settle on one thing. It was always pretty apparent that I wanted to be involved as a teacher. I loved teaching, I loved my teachers when I was a little kid. When I was a little girl, my second-grade teacher was absolutely who I wanted to be in life. I just had this thing about teaching.

And I came from a tradition of teachers, as well. The strong women in my family were all teachers. When you think of it, back then, generations ago, teaching and nursing were really the only things women could do that would gain any kind of revenue. If you were smart, and you had drive beyond being a nice little “wife-person”, that was your option.

I've been poor most of my life, but at least I've been doing things that are true.


Q: What and who are your greatest inspirations as a painter?
A: Well. Somebody who's still alive... I love Wolf Kahn, Rothko, people who work with surface. I really love surface. That, to me, is what's beautiful. And then there are other just obscure people, like Sérusier, who I love. I love a few of Hans Hofmann's works. Same kind of thing – the reaction of color; what color does.

I like the Fauvists a lot, and the Nabi. The Nabi is a group of folks – their whole deal, both the Fauvists and the Nabi were kinda “post-post-Impressionists”, who were working with just the sense of surface, and color, and just the intense emotional reaction you can get to color.

[There was] that, and being left alone a lot, too. My folks, when we'd go to Chicago to visit our family, they'd just drop my sister and me at the Art Institute to just wander around. It was being left alone, and not being too pressured to be rich and powerful and important.

Again, during my era, being a woman had its implications, and one of them was that you didn't have to think much about a career, which was horrible, really. It had more downsides than good sides. One of the good sides was that you didn't have to think too much about a hard-driving career, which could possibly take away other parts of your life, that rounded you out.

Q: What are some of your favorite pieces of your own – that you've done?
A: I like the cows I just made. I think they're fun. It's hard to say, just, I guess the ones that seem most successful as an integrated whole. All of the brushstrokes, all of the sense of color are balanced. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes I can do a painting in a couple of hours, and other times it'll take me days and days and days. But usually I find the ones that don't take me very long are the ones I like the most.

Q: What advice do you have for aspiring artists? Cliché question, I know.
A: Keep doing it. If you have to do it, do it. It's like anything passionate you have, whether it's climbing, or painting, or running, or singing, whatever it is, you just have to do it. You have to ignore the irritating professors who say “don't do it.”

And then, when you are doing it, you have to find joy in it. And that's hard. I know that sounds dumb, but it's hard. If you're getting serious about something that you love to do, and you want to do it and pursue it and learn more and be better, sometimes that quest just takes the joy out of it. You don't feel good enough. You feel like everyone else is better than you are. Sometimes that can overwhelm your pure love of what you're doing.

So, I guess my biggest advice would be one, to do it, and two, to once you're doing it, ignore the voices that say people are better and that people are going to swallow you up. And enjoy.

Alison Baker paints and teaches piano and art history at the Boathouse in Takoma Park.