Joan Baker A Retrospective: 65 years of painting

10 July - 11 September 2010

“…the ground beneath my feet and the sky above my head
and all that happens to be in between.” Joan Baker

This exhibition was created and toured by the University of Glamorgan in order to mark the recent awarding of fully accredited museum status to the Art Collection Museum at the university.

Joan Baker lives in Cardiff, where she was born in December 1922 and she trained in the city under Evan Charlton (1904-84) and Ceri Richards (1903-71) during the Second World War. Her student contemporaries there included Glenys Cour (b 1924) and Bert Isaac (1923-2006) and she was no stranger to juggling what were risky, outdoor fire watching duties with her thoroughly engrossing art studies. From the age of 16 she had known that she wanted to be either a painter who gardened or a gardener who painted – and she continues to be an exemplary example of the former in her 88th year.

She commenced what turned out to be a long, professional career as a much-respected artist and art educator in south Wales in 1945. In that very year she produced a large public mural, The Pleasures of Peace, for Pencoed hostel at Pencoed, and a small easel painting Margam Abbey. She began teaching at Cardiff College of Art in 1945. Amongst her many students were the painters Charles Burton, Ivor Davies, Gwyn Evans, Gillian Hilbourne, Glyn Jones, Mary Lloyd Jones, Peter Prendergast and Ernest Zobole, right through to younger generation painters such as Brendan Burns, Carol Hiles and Sally Moore.

Baker exhibited extensively in Wales from 1948 to 1962 and her early work, which included figure painting, was acquired by the Arts Council in Cardiff, the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery and the National Museum of Wales Schools Service Department. From 1964 to 1983 she was Assistant Director of Studies and Head of Foundation at Cardiff, working alongside the newly appointed Director of Studies Tom Hudson (1922-98) and, after his departure, she worked in conjunction with her former student Glyn Jones (b 1936) who became the institution’s first Professor of Fine Art. Even in the late 1970s, she was the only female member of the full-time staff in the Foundation Department, her colleagues including Christopher Shurrock (b 1939) and Stephen Young (b 1946). She had her first solo exhibition, Joan Baker: A Chosen Way, at the college’s Howard Gardens Gallery in 1984.

Throughout that latter twenty-year period, and in the twenty-five years since, she has continued to paint the coast, gardens, parks, woods and hills of the Glamorgan she knows so intimately.

Dr Ceri Thomas