After years of quietly developing his style under the radar of the art world, painter Charming Baker has suddenly become one of the UK’s most popular and collectable artists. As he prepares for his Covent Garden exhibition this summer, supported by Sir Paul Smith, he talks to CGJ about success, integrity and why a nice picture of a fruit bowl is out of the question…
There’s nothing like a rags to riches story to warm the cockles. It’s a shame then that Charming Baker never really went through the whole rags phase before the riches finally arrived – instead he worked happily, if never especially lucratively, on his art for a good couple of decades before being rewarded for his maturing talent. But in a way, that makes his story even more heartwarming – in an era of the arts in which youth and newness are valued above all things, it is always reassuring to hear of an artist whose vision has been fertilised in the dark before being thrust fully formed into the limelight, especially one who works in so unfashionable a medium as paint on canvass.
Charming Baker was born and brought up in Ripon, north Yorkshire. He was christened Alan, but in Ripon everyone gets a nickname and Charming “had a reputation for being polite”. After leaving school at 15 and spending some time digging up roads, he was accepted onto a graphic design and illustration course at Central St Martin’s at the age of 21. In the decades since graduating he has been teaching part time, winning the occasional commercial commission, selling the odd painting, working from a studio in his garden and helping to raise his five children. A deeply unpretentious man, he has resolutely eschewed the shameless networking demanded by the gallery system, but without which his work always seemed destined to remain hidden from a wider audience. Then in 2006 an exhibition of his paintings was staged at the Truman Brewery on Brick Lane, and its success led to a steady burgeoning of his profile. Things began to really take off after Pat Magnarella, the manager of American rock band Green Day, was introduced to Charming’s work by one of his staff and decided to take a leap into the art world by taking over the promotion of this little known English painter. With the punch and chutzpah of a brash publicity machine behind him, the artist became a sensation in America, with thousands of New York hipsters flocking to his show, Stupid Has A New Hero. As his stock continues to rise on both sides of the water, Charming’s paintings now sell for prices that a few years ago would have seemed outrageous.
Damien Hirst and Sir Paul Smith are both enthusiastic collectors of his work, and it is as a brand ambassador for Paul Smith London that Charming finds himself in his fellow Yorkshireman’s Covent Garden fiefdom, with a major exhibition of his work running in the Mercer Street Studios in July. It is an unusual space – perfect for a man whose paintings have a strong streak of oddness running through them. “It used to be an old fruit warehouse and still has the old storage cellars underneath that smell faintly of bananas,” he says. “Not your usually gallery smell.”
A garden gnome. A mobile phone. A ceramic baking bowl for making bread. On their own the tokens of relationships past are devoid of meaning, significant only to the couples who once cherished them. Put them and their story into the aptly named 
