Hannah Ivory Baker

This painting began without a plan. Waterlilies arrived not as an image to replicate, but as a sensation. A memory of light sitting on water, of growth and stillness existing at once. The surface was built slowly, interrupted and returned to, allowing forms to surface and recede rather than resolve. It lives in the space between seeing and remembering, asking to be spent time with rather than decoded.

This work resists arriving anywhere fixed. Forms loosen and soften, refusing to settle into something fully named. What remains is not an image but a state, shaped by hesitation, layering and time. The painting holds its ambiguity carefully, allowing space for looking without resolution, and for meaning to shift rather than solidify.

Alla prima is often described as speed or spontaneity, but for me it is a discipline. Working wet into wet demands clarity, restraint and trust. Each decision narrows the field of possibility, and letting go becomes as important as knowing when to act. This essay reflects on painting directly, accepting uncertainty, and learning to stop before the work is over explained.

A Moment Held explores the quiet intensity of a pause in time, a moment where nothing visibly changes, yet everything feels charged. The landscape remains intentionally ambiguous, with hovering forms and an unsettled horizon that resists clarity or resolution. As the year draws to a close, the work reflects on the value of slowing down, of allowing space for moments that are fully inhabited before being quietly released.

A reflection on dusk as a threshold, this studio note explores memory, stillness, and the quiet act of waiting at the water’s edge, where light softens and time momentarily loosens.

Still life has never felt still to me. Flowers shift constantly, even as they sit in water. They open, lean, bruise and fade. Painting them is not an act of preservation but of attention. I am less interested in holding a moment in place than in acknowledging its movement, its brief insistence on being noticed. The challenge is not to describe what I see, but to allow the painting to remain alive, unsettled, and unresolved in the same way the subject is.

A time came when painting stopped fitting neatly into my days. Instead, it slipped into the margins, early mornings, half hours, the quiet before the house stirred. What I lost in uninterrupted time, I gained in clarity. Each mark began to matter more. Each decision carried weight. Painting became less about control and more about attention, about trusting what could happen when time was limited but intention was not.