Featured Artist Alix Baker

Alix Baker shares a fascinating background as a military artist and a portfolio of paintings based on life experience and travel. Learn more by visiting her website.

 

 

I am a painter of people and places in several media. My work is exhibited in London, around the UK and occasionally abroad. I like to create a feeling of a story extending beyond the canvas, whether a landscape or figure. I’m told that people love my sense of colour and light. Maybe it comes from having a cramped studio and there being a wider story beyond it!

 

 

Now for my story beyond the canvas. I attended art college in London and was offered an apprenticeship by the great jewellery designer Andrew Grima. However, “storing” my art side I worked in educational publishing, No. 10 Downing Street and intelligence. This experience included a spell in Saigon during the Vietnam War and Islamabad in the India-Pakistan war of 1971, which I had intended to do since the age of eight living in Cyprus during the Eoka Cyprus Emergency.

 

 

Perhaps due to looking for a quieter life, art came knocking. I let it gradually emerge during a posting to Singapore. I’d always been interested in military history and the evolution of dress in combat. That is frequently very different to military regulations and requires deep research in contemporaneous journals and, eventually, photographs.

 

 

Nowadays, it’s surprising how someone remembers their kit in battle often differently to the next person. It was fun counting rivets on WWI tanks and finding no two with the same number. Women in the armaments factories just riveted randomly!

 

 

My military art was mainly official commissions from units, many military museums in the UK, and some abroad. Articles for international militaria publications, book jackets and battle maps were another side.

 

 

A dry profession? Not at all!  I was asked to go on a Royal Navy ship in the middle of winter in the North Sea when heavily pregnant (I declined). Subsequently I was asked to go to Bosnia, but the military unit was spread widely and there was concern that taking me around might make me appear more like Jemima Bond! At a bad financial moment I got a nice commission from China to design a box for a WW2 military modelling kit. One painting was lost in the sinking of HMS Sheffield in the Falklands War, and others in the Iraq invasion of Kuwait.

 

 

In the 1980s I had three wonderful years in Oman. Just before leaving, the late ruler Sultan Qaboos bin Said commissioned 25 paintings. Clutching a letter from his palace, I dashed around the country visiting military units, bands and orchestras, aircraft and naval ships, recording everything I needed for painting back in the UK. A British woman bearing palace instructions to comply with my wishes must have been a total novelty!

 

 

I was honoured to chair the Armed Forces Art Society for six years, the first woman and non-military person to do so. King Charles was our patron and fellow exhibitor. Occasionally, I write articles on art as a profession or hobby and have also been studied by senior school students.

 

Alix Baker invites you to follow on Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest.

 

 

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