JEWEL MOUNTAIN by El Baker

Print by El Baker

Sun-Drenched Artist Statement:

“The works for this show can best be described as playing with nature. My collection is a mix of Texas landscape, Western mountains and raw, unpolished, shapes. All of the pieces started as more refined paintings with which I thought I’d “follow the rules” and paint something according to how they looked in the real world. But, the pieces just felt flat and lacking layers of experimentation and history, so I started playing with the depicted nature — I painted over, I scraped off pastel, I squeegeed on a stain — giving the pieces more depth and richness, much like what it feels like to travel through western landscapes and to think about someone else having been there before and the many stories buried underneath the rich Texas soil.”