Christie Baker is a self-taught, contemporary Canadian painter based in Toronto. Since her first exhibition in 2022, she has developed a growing professional practice, with work presented in galleries, juried and curated exhibitions, art fairs, corporate environments, and private collections across Canada and internationally.

Working primarily in acrylic and mixed media, Baker draws on the language of still life to investigate relationships between materials, memory, and domestic space. Her paintings bring together vessels, botanical forms, and architectural motifs, often on reclaimed textiles and raw linen. Vessels function as portraits of family history, while spatial relationships between objects, through repetition, fragmentation, and intervals, create compositions that extend beyond the individual forms.

Baker’s practice has been enriched by artist residencies in Canada and France, including Hôtel Sainte-Valière, La Maison de Beaumont, Gibraltar Point, and six months on the Gatineau River in Gatineau Park, Quebec. A published writer of creative non-fiction and personal essays, she brings a parallel interest in narrative and observation to her visual practice.

Baker serves as Vice Chair and Incoming Chair of the Artists’ Network Board of Directors. She is an Associate Member of the Society of Canadian Artists and a member of the Federation of Canadian Artists.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

My practice begins with a belief in the material nature of painting. Acrylic, reclaimed textiles, raw linen, ink, charcoal, and oil pastel are not simply means to depict an image; they retain their own character, history, and physical presence.

I use still life as a language for exploring relationships—between objects, materials, memory, and space. Vessels, botanical forms, and domestic motifs become points of connection rather than subjects in isolation. Their arrangements, repetitions, interruptions, and intervals create a shifting field in which what happens between things can be as significant as the things themselves.

Through layering, erasure, fragmentation, and the interplay of raw and painted surfaces, I allow materials to remain visible and active within the work. Forms can extend beyond the edges, resist resolution, or reappear across the surface, suggesting relationships that continue beyond the frame.

I am interested in how painting can hold both recognition and ambiguity: the familiarity of an object and the accumulated histories it carries, alongside the physical immediacy of paint, fabric, surface, and space.