BILL BAKER
Bill Baker is an artist and architectural designer whose work investigates the shifting boundaries between flatness, depth, and the perceptual language of space. Working primarily with charcoal and oil pastel on paper, he creates compositions where forms appear to slip, overlap, and recalibrate the viewer’s sense of dimensionality. What emerges is a visual field in constant flux, where space becomes both volume and colour.
Baker’s practice is rooted in a lifelong engagement with depth. As an architect, he understands geometry as something shaped simultaneously by light and form. In his paintings, this relationship becomes inverted. Colour expands or compresses the pictorial space, destabilizing the conventional hierarchy between painting and architecture. Charcoal and pastel absorb into the fibres of the paper, creating blacks that feel dense and luminous and colours that hover between surface and space.
His sensitivity to perception is heightened by the fact that he sees with one eye. Without stereoscopic vision, Baker measures distance through instinct and scale rather than binocular depth. This distinct way of sensing the world informs the entire series. He explores a field where flatness prevails, yet subtle cues invite the eye toward shallow, ambiguous depth. The result is a body of work that oscillates between stability and illusion, between what is seen and what is intuited.
Form, for Baker, is never static. Edges become moments of connection and tension. Some are sharp and architectural, others softened or layered, charged with the meeting of tone and colour. His compositions centre on blacks and greys punctuated by vivid rectangles of pink, yellow, blue, or red. These chromatic interruptions recall the sensibilities of Joan Miró or Luis Barragán, yet remain firmly grounded in Baker’s own spatial vocabulary.
Baker began exhibiting in Vancouver’s contemporary art community in the 1990s, including early presentations with the influential gallery Catriona Jefferies, aligning his work with a lineage of West Coast abstraction and conceptual exploration. His artistic foundation, however, reaches back to his formative years in Paris. While studying art history at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in the mid-sixties, he encountered influential artists of the period, including Alberto Giacometti, experiences that quietly shaped his understanding of presence, scale, and the charged space between forms.
His wide-ranging career extends across art, architecture, and design. Between 1984 and 2022, he maintained a dual practice in contemporary sustainable architecture, public art, and studio-based visual work. From 1978 to 2005, he served as Principal of R.U.I.N., a design and build firm that realized more than fifty residential projects in British Columbia, Ontario, Florida, and Shikoku, Japan. Earlier, he worked as an urban planner for the City of Vancouver and for William Blakely and Associates from 1969 to 1977, following his early professional years as a graphic designer for Hydro Quebec.
Now based on the Sunshine Coast in British Columbia, Baker continues to work as both an artist and a residential designer specializing in green and off-grid architecture. Across these disciplines, he remains guided by a central question. How do we occupy space, and how is our experience of it shaped by light? His works offer one answer. They invite prolonged looking, revealing depth within flatness and a quiet, resonant sense of connection.
