Angela Baker
Angela Baker – Dawn in Blue Mountain
I grew up in the foothills of the Blue Mts. in Golden Spring. The distant atmospheric pale blues always lured me long before I knew about aerial perspective. I wanted to know how to paint that colour to get that effect of distance. Hoping to find out, I sailed all the way across the Atlantic in a banana boat to cold, old England to art school, when all I needed to know was “add white!”
I used to ride a horse on the ridge between Hermitage Dam road and Kingston, and from Golden Spring to Mt. James. The magic of mountains and the mystery of distances were a magnet. What is around the next corner? What new vista will emerge?
Though in mid-life I moved to another island, Newfoundland, off Canada’s east coast, my heart never left the roots of my artistic identity, Jamaica. My passion for Jamaica’s Blue Mountains lasted into my septuagenarian days. This yearning has brought me home repeatedly. As I cannot afford the luxury of time to paint plein air in the mountains, I photographed the mountains with the intention of painting them in my absence from Jamaica. I have returned to New Castle, Hardwar Gap, Silver Hill Gap, Clydesdale, Cinchona, Guava Ridge, Mahogany Vale, Whitfield Hall and Blue Mountain Peak.
At age nineteen I and a group of friends had hiked from Hagley Gap to Whitfield Hall and Blue Mountain Peak. In my seventies I returned to Whitfield Hall one winter and walked as far as I could with Ras Loxley, with many stops to catch my breath, restricted by COPD. I made it nearly to Portland Gap. Ras Loxley said he could have found me a donkey. I resolved to do just that the following year. Thus it was that I rode a donkey from Whitfield Hall to Blue Mountain Peak at age 74, with my camera dangling around my neck. “The arse on the ass” became a standing joke with friends and family.
The structural forms of the mountains’ interlocking spurs always fascinated me, but it was the dramatic early morning light that blew me away. I could say “blue” me away. I was awed by one particularly significant experience of light behind clouds creating a stark silhouette of a banana tree and seemingly singling out and penetrating the light green of a banana leaf.
This was the inspiration for my painting “Blue Mountain Dawn”.
This honour feels to me like the completion of a circle, a gestalt, a sharing of my artistic roots with my country, a “thank you” to the source of my inspiration, a symbolic home coming of the heart.
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