SU BAKER

For more than thirty years Su Baker has been a teacher and, over the last decade, Director at the Victorian College of the Arts, earning an Order of Australia for her efforts. During that time she has never stopped returning to her first love – painting. While it may be her passion, there is nothing simple about painting for Baker – at times it feels like a battle, she says.

sustained conflict and conversation. Indeed, there seems to be a rigorous debate occurring between abstraction and figuration – almost a battle, I suggest. ‘Yes, that is pretty much it!’ says Baker. ‘A battle to the death perhaps. I think one of the tensions in art, well, painting, since the turn debates in postwar Australia, and indeed heightened with the explosion of tropes in the 1980s, with the avenged return of the image!’