About Christie
Christie Baker is a contemporary painter based in Toronto. Her work uses the language of still life to explore the relationships between objects, materials, space, and memory.
I’ve always been creative. For many years, that creativity was woven into family life: cooking, entertaining, decorating, collecting, and finding ways to bring a little beauty into everyday life.
After our daughter grew up, I found myself with the space and time to finally pay attention to the creative voice that had always been there. In 2019 I began painting more seriously, and during the Toronto lockdown I took two online art workshops that set me on a new path. My first exhibition was in 2022.
Today I work as a full-time artist from my studio in Toronto, where I explore familiar forms, like vessels, botanical motifs, and domestic objects, as a way to think about connection, continuity, and what we carry with us.
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THE WORK
Nothing Stands Alone
I think of each painting as a living field of relationships. An object is changed by what surrounds it, a material by what is placed against it, and a mark by what came before. Even the quietest passages, like the raw linen between forms, a partially erased line, or the trace of an earlier layer, have a presence and purpose of their own.
Still life gives me a framework for exploring these relationships. Vessels can read as individual portraits; gathered together, they become something akin to family portraits. Their meaning shifts through proximity, distance, repetition and overlap, and through the spaces that separate and connect them.
Materials carry their own histories. I work with acrylic paint, reclaimed textiles, raw linen, ink, charcoal and oil pastels, allowing each to retain something of its original character. I am less interested in disguising these materials than in what happens when they meet: paint remains paint, textile remains textile, and traces of mark-making are allowed to stay visible.
Nothing in the painting is entirely independent of anything else. Object and space, surface and material, realism and abstraction continually alter one another. It is within these shifting relationships that the painting finds its meaning.
IN THE STUDIO
My work begins in the studio, surrounded by the objects, materials, and spaces that inspire me. I paint with acrylic, ink, oil pastel, charcoal and reclaimed textiles, including dressmakers’ muslin, fine linen drapery panels, table cloths acquired in France, and house painter’s canvas. Each item retains its individual history, which remains visible in the work.