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Canberra Today 22°/26° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Artistic representation of breathtaking mysteries

THERE were no prizes for guessing what a large “still life” of apples was doing in artist Bob Baker’s exhibition, “Venture into Physics – The Journey Continues”, which opened at CSIRO Discovery Centre last night, continuing until April 11.

The symbolic Newtonian apple
The symbolic Newtonian apple
It took me a nanosecond to work it out before I read the title, “Homage to Newton.” Elsewhere, the insinuating eyes of Erwin Schrödinger’s “cat” quantum mechanics experiment gaze out from another canvas as the artist, who now lives in Bodalla, NSW, works with the shapes and proportions that conjure up for him everything from the Big Bang to Black Holes, both in paintings and in an unusually playful sculptures installed in plastic specimen boxes.

“I feel tender about the subject of physics,” the artist says, “because it is about functions as yet being formalised by science…it is for me reaching into the unknown—quite a challenge to any painter.”

The exhibition, praised by CSIRO Discovery director Cris Kennedy as uniquely suited to the exhibition space and purposes of “Discovery,” was opened by author and Citynews columnist, Robert Macklin, who has had a lifelong interest in the intersection of art and science of who is an unabashed fan of Baker’s paintings.

An edited version of his speech follows:

‘Bob Baker was born in England and from the beginning found himself embraced by the world of art, a world that he has been exploring ever since. When he was only 10 years old his first serious work was immortalised in bronze. He painted, he sculpted, he exhibited and he explored. He and Pat, his wonderful life’s companion, left their native shores and travelled to the continent, to Picasso’s Spain and to Van Gogh’s France where for three years he lived in Provence where the master lived out the wild wonder and tragedy of his life…

So in 1972 he and Pat came to Australia and in the years that followed his explorations took him to Camden where he established an art society, where he taught aspiring artists and became the foundation director of the CamdenArtGallery. The Australian landscape fascinated him and the power of his work resulted in his being a perennial finalist in the Wynne Landscape prize throughout the 1970s.

His paintings reaped many prizes and his output from this time is to be found in serious national and international collections. But with the restlessness of the born explorer he moved on from the Cow Pastures to the South Coast of New South Wales, an area for which we both share a great affection, and one which, curiously enough, has brought us together frequently over these last few months…

But Bob’s exploratory journey was still in its early stages; as the new century dawned he suddenly hurtled forward and outwards into the universe, much like the early universe itself in the nanoseconds after the Big Bang when it underwent what physicists call inflation. Suddenly, the landscapes and the magpies were left behind as Bob’s journey took him to the far reaches of what we fancifully call reality. And as he plunged into this world beyond worlds, he took with him as guides, some of the great physicists of our time – Otto Frisch, for example, with his splendid book, “The Nature of Matter”, Stephen Hawking, Paul Davies, Brian Clegg’s “Before the Big Bang” and most recently Laurence Krauss’s “A Universe from Nothing.”

Spurning the internet, Bob haunted the local libraries, read everything he could get is hands on…and was amazed by the discoveries and the interplay of theories, of quantum mechanics, cosmology, and theoretical physics. He was a child again, reading “Alice in Wonderland”and “Gulliver’s Travels” and – because he is an artist – building pictures and concepts in his mind as he went along.

Then he took his own quantum leap and began to turn his lifetime of experience with paint to try to render these concepts in the two dimensions of an artist’s canvas…

By then Bob had moved beyond the equal and opposite notions of motion; and taking the symbolic Newtonian apple he transformed it with infinite delicacy into an object of cosmological mystery and revelation.

Those paintings retain an extraordinary attraction but Bob’s explorations were racing ahead like Hubble’s red shift, accelerating the further he went from the shores of Tuross and Bodalla in his quest. Einstein’s relativity, Heisenberg’s quantum mechanics, Schrödinger’s cat, Hawking’s Black Holes, Susskind’s Strings, all passed into that fertile mind and demanded to be transmuted into art…

But he was not satisfied with solving the incredibly difficult representation of these esoteric concepts and … he chose to build his models from the most basic household materials and to place them all in plastic specimen jars…

And this, perhaps, is Bob’s greatest achievement – that he has single-handedly shown that the worlds of art and of science are not strangers…They are in simply different renderings of the same breath-taking mystery and same journey by the brave explorers among our number.”

L to r. CSIRO Discovery’s Cris Kennedy, artist Bob Baker, writer Robert Macklin. Schrödinger's “cat” on the right.
L to r. CSIRO Discovery’s Cris Kennedy, artist Bob Baker, writer Robert Macklin. Schrödinger’s “cat” on the right.

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Helen Musa

Helen Musa

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