Neighbors: Wildlife Paintings by Hilary Baker
December 7, 2024 – April 6, 2025
Growing up in the latter years of Hollywood’s Golden Age, Los Angeles-born Hilary Baker (b. 1948) spent her childhood exploring the hills and canyons near her home, searching for animal bones and other evidence of wild creatures amid the backdrop of iconic Angeleno architecture. This desire to collect and archive elements of a vanishing landscape became the inspiration for her series of paintings entitled Predators.
Featuring more than one dozen contemporary works, accomplished painter Hilary Baker explores the complex relationship between manmade spaces and native wildlife. Highlighting iconic architecture and wildlife as both prominent and enigmatic, each work invites an encounter and raises questions about our own proximity to wildlife.
These foreboding undertones are carefully restrained and contained in a crisp, confident graphic style, which Baker credits to her childhood love of cartoons and animation. In particular, she looks to the works of Hungarian-born animator Jules Engel and the award winning 1950 animated short Gerald McBoing-Boing about a child who speaks through sound effects rather than words.
Similar examples of synthesizing the natural can be seen in Baker’s portrayal of native wildlife. While they are very much a portrait, the details are not filled in like zoological or textbook illustrations. Instead, their features can appear in flat color blocks or even textures, such as faux-wood paneling, anchoring them in both the natural and constructed world, creating a slightly unsettling familiarity—asking the viewer to examine their own relationship with the world around them.
Hilary Baker received her Bachelor of Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles, and her Master of Fine Arts from the Otis Art Institute (now Otis College of Art & Design). Her work is included in numerous public collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, the Crocker Art Museum, the Broad Art Foundation, Temple University and the University of Southern California.
