"The most important quality an artist can possess is talent.
Integrity alone does not produce beauty: commitment to one’s ideas, in isolation does not necessarily produce anything worth communicating to others.
I have watched Tessa develop all three of these innate qualities over many years, from the early days of the Slade Summer School’s life drawings and figurative paintings, through to the vibrant breathing abstracts of today. At times it has been a heart wrenching journey.
Although the struggle between ‘concept’ and the ‘created’ is one with which all artists are familiar, not all can withstand the constant need for honest self-criticism and rigorous assessment that this ungoverned vocation requires.

The transformation of the figurative drawings and watercolours which fill her sketchbooks, into the oil paintings in her studio bear witness to this artist’s agility to deliver her vision through the beautiful and tangible series of paintings which compromise this collection.

Bonnard told a visitor to his studio in Le Cannet in 1941:
It is enough for the painter if windows are sufficiently large to allow the full radiance of the daylight to penetrate like lightening, so that all its nuances can strike everything that it happens to encounter.

Tessa Baker’s canvasses are such windows, and her use of paint is the radiant daylight striking the viewer as he encounters each of them".

Richard Winkworth