Beverly Baker is a visual artist with Downs Syndrome and OCD tendencies who devotes daily practice to her craft at Latitude Arts. Latitude is an art studio and day training program in Lexington, KY that is committed to serving all individuals and especially those considered to have a disability. Baker is mostly nonverbal, though she does possess her own spoken vocabulary with which friends and loved ones are familiar.
Statement
Written on behalf of Beverly Baker by Emily Miller and edited by Paul Brown
When Bruce Burris and Crystal Bader founded Latitude Arts in 2001, Beverly Baker participated as one of the first artists. Before her time at Latitude, she worked at a secure paper shredding facility, destroying confidential documents such as tax forms, prison records, and mental health evaluations. Quiet and stealthy, Baker began pilfering these documents as the opportunity arose, ferrying them home and keeping a makeshift art studio on a table at her mother’s salon. These discarded documents became the foundation for her richly textured explorations of line, value, color and form.
Baker’s preferred media include the humble Bic ballpoint pen as well as permanent marker, crayon, or colored pen not kept under close surveillance. Attending to each detail as though time were no object, her artistic process envelopes her daily routine. Pencils are sharpened to a razor point and re-sharpened. Images are clipped from magazines and trimmed to perfection with a magic number of snips. Chosen clippings offer Baker a word or image that serves as the starting point for her compositions. Often Baker begins with her own name, adding other letters or digits until the sea of layered characters becomes illegible. Here and there, she samples pops of color, laying swatches adjacent to one another as though selecting a palette that pleases her. Curvilinear strokes are drawn over and retraced, scoring the paper to a burnished, leathery touch.
What was once white is now buried in marks of black, black-blue, and grey. Peeps of vibrant color show through, heightening the intensity of the morass of dark lines that appear to swallow the page. The surface reflects an iridescent, purplish-bronze sheen characteristic to Bic ballpoint pen ink. Due to her obsessive process and treatment of materials, one artwork may take weeks to several months to complete. Upon finishing, Baker presents the piece to her Latitude staff accompanied by one of her rare, yet enthusiastic, vocalizations.
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