Christopher Baker in the Arctic 2017 Painting and Midnight Sun Carborundum Prints
Artist Christopher Baker’s 2017 Arctic paintings and later Midnight Sun carborundum prints mark a clear point of focus in his work: the meeting of low northern light, moving ice, open water, and the physical act of making an image.
The Arctic trip gave Baker a subject that changes by the hour. Under the midnight sun, shadows stretch without nightfall, colour shifts slowly rather than sharply, and the horizon can seem both calm and unstable. That experience fed a group of paintings and prints that place the viewer inside a landscape defined by distance, cold, and constant light.
The works are notable not only for their subject, but for their method. Baker’s use of carborundum printmaking brings grit, density, and relief to the surface. The process suits the Arctic theme because it gives visual weight to what could otherwise appear distant or delicate. Ice, rock, sea, and sunlight become tactile.
A 2017 Arctic journey became a working source
Baker’s Arctic visit in 2017 placed him in one of the most demanding visual environments an artist can face. The region does not offer a simple view. It shifts between stillness and threat, brightness and opacity, vast space and close texture.
For painters, that presents a problem and an opportunity. The Arctic can easily become symbolic, reduced to white ice and empty silence. Baker’s work appears to move away from that simplification. His paintings and later prints focus on surface, weather, and changing light rather than spectacle alone.
The phrase “Midnight Sun” carries a natural drama, but in practice it describes something subtle. In high Arctic summer, the sun remains above the horizon for long periods. The result is not one frozen golden hour. It is a long sequence of light conditions, with colour and shadow moving in slow gradients.
That extended light matters in Baker’s images. Instead of the hard contrast of day and night, the works suggest suspended time. The viewer senses that the scene is still changing, even when the composition feels quiet.
Baker’s 2017 Arctic paintings can be understood as records of observation, but not in the narrow sense of exact topography. They are not travel illustrations. They use the Arctic as a living visual field, where paint can respond to fog, glare, broken ice, and the weight of the horizon.
This is where the paintings connect naturally with the later Midnight Sun carborundum prints. The prints do not simply reproduce the paintings. They translate the Arctic experience into another language, one based on pressure, grain, ink, and plate.
The paintings hold the first response to place
Painting offers immediacy. An artist can make changes quickly, work wet into wet, scrape back a surface, or build thin layers to catch light. For a place as visually unstable as the Arctic, those qualities are useful.
Baker’s Arctic paintings draw attention to the act of looking. The eye has to settle into them. Forms may suggest ice shelves, waterlines, distant ridges, or cloud cover, yet they often resist a fixed reading. That uncertainty feels true to the subject. In polar regions, scale can be hard to judge. A far ridge can look near. A bank of cloud can resemble land. A reflection can blur the difference between sea and sky.
The 2017 works also reflect a strong concern with colour. Arctic light is often imagined as white or blue, but the midnight sun introduces warmer tones. Gold, rose, grey, green, violet, and slate can sit beside each other. Baker’s paintings make room for those shifts.
The strongest point in this body of work may be its refusal to treat the Arctic as empty. Even where no human figure appears, the landscape does not feel blank. It carries movement and pressure. Open water meets ice. Light falls across surfaces that reflect, absorb, and fracture it.
That sense of pressure is important. Arctic imagery often arrives in public life through science, news, or expedition records. Baker’s paintings belong to a different tradition. They do not report data. They register experience. They offer a record of how a place can affect vision, memory, and material handling.
The works also sit within a longer history of artists travelling north to test the limits of landscape art. The Arctic has drawn painters, printmakers, photographers, and writers because it exposes the limits of familiar forms. Perspective, colour, and scale all become less stable. Baker’s 2017 project can be seen as part of that continuing artistic response, while remaining grounded in his own handling of surface and light.
Carborundum gave the midnight sun physical weight
The Midnight Sun carborundum prints extend the Arctic project through a medium known for texture. Carborundum printmaking uses an abrasive grit, often applied to a plate with adhesive. Once inked and printed, the rough areas hold rich deposits of ink. The result can be dark, grainy, and heavily textured.
That process matters because it changes how a viewer reads the image. A carborundum print is not only seen. It suggests touch. The surface can carry ridges, rough zones, and dense tonal fields that make the image feel built rather than merely transferred.
For Baker’s Arctic subject, the method is especially fitting. Ice and rock are not smooth ideas. They are abrasive, layered, fractured, and resistant. Carborundum gives the print surface a way to echo those qualities without copying them literally.
The midnight sun, by contrast, is light. It has no physical surface. The challenge is to give that light presence without turning it into decoration. Baker’s prints appear to answer this by setting luminous areas against dense ink and grain. Light becomes something that presses against darkness, texture, and mass.
The move from paint to print also changes the sense of time. Painting often shows revision through visible layers. Printmaking relies on preparation, pressure, and transfer. The plate carries decisions before the image appears on paper. Each impression can hold slight changes in inking and pressure, but the process has a different discipline.
That discipline suits a subject shaped by repetition. The Arctic’s midnight sun is not a single instant. It is an extended condition. The print process, with its repeated impressions and controlled variation, can mirror that duration.
The story of Christopher Baker in the Arctic 2017 painting and Midnight Sun carborundum prints is therefore not only about a journey north. It is about an artist finding a medium that could carry the force of what he saw.
Midnight Sun Carborundum Relief Prints by Christopher Baker:
Midnight Sun I (North) by Christopher Baker carborundum print edition of 8, 54 x 78 cm Midnight Sun II (Late Sky) by Christopher Baker carborundum print edition of 8, 54 x 78 cm Midnight Sun III (Dawn) by Christopher Baker carborundum print edition of 8, 54 x 78 cm 
Midnight Sun IV (Sun) by Christopher Baker carborundum print edition of 8, 54 x 78 cm Midnight Sun V (Glacier) by Christopher Baker carborundum print edition of 8, 54 x 78 cm 
Midnight Sun VI (Rock, Sea, Ice) by Christopher Baker carborundum print edition of 8, 54 x 78 cm
Midnight Sun VII (Midnight) by Christopher Baker carborundum print edition of 8, 54 x 156 cm
Above are the Midnight Sun full series of seven prints:
(click the prints to scroll thorugh larger images with titles)
Midnight Sun I - North
Midnight Sun II - Late Sky
Midnight Sun III -Dawn
Midnight Sun IV - Sun
Midnight Sun V - Glacier
Midnight Sun VI - Rock, Sea, Ice
Midnight Sun VII - Midnight
All the prints are in an edition of 8 and 54 x 78cm, except VII Midnight (diptych) which is 54 x 156cm
The Arctic works arrive at a time of sharper public attention
Any contemporary Arctic artwork now exists against a wider background of environmental concern. The region has become one of the clearest symbols of climate change, even when an artwork does not address climate directly.
Baker’s 2017 paintings and Midnight Sun prints do not need to function as campaigning images to feel timely. Their attention to fragility, surface, and light already places them within a changed way of seeing the Arctic. Viewers today bring knowledge of melting ice, warming seas, and shifting habitats to almost any polar image.
That context gives the work an added charge. A painting of ice or Arctic light is no longer only a landscape image. It can also feel like a record of conditions that may be changing quickly.
Still, the power of Baker’s work seems to rest in restraint. Rather than forcing a message onto the subject, the images invite close looking. They ask for patience. That matters at a time when Arctic imagery is often consumed quickly, as news footage, satellite views, or dramatic photographs.
The carborundum prints slow the eye down. Their surfaces reward attention. Dark textures, pale passages, and grainy transitions encourage a viewer to move closer. The works make the Arctic less remote by making its light and surfaces material.
This is a different form of urgency. It is not loud. It comes from care.
The print series connects technique with memory
One of the clearest strengths of the Midnight Sun prints is the way technique and memory appear to meet. Carborundum is not a neutral process. It leaves a strong signature. The grain of the medium can recall rock, snow crust, rough ice, or the breaking edge of water.
That does not mean each texture should be read as a direct symbol. The better reading is more open. Baker uses the process to create an atmosphere where the Arctic can be felt as much as recognised.
The prints also suggest how memory works after travel. A journey does not remain in the mind as a neat sequence of views. It returns as flashes, surfaces, tones, and sensations. The midnight sun might be remembered not only as a sight, but as sleepless brightness, cold air, glare on water, or the strange flattening of time.
Printmaking allows those impressions to become concentrated. A smaller sheet of paper can carry the weight of a vast place because the surface is dense with decisions.
For collectors and viewers, that gives the works a specific appeal. They hold the drama of an extreme environment, but they also show the artist’s hand in a direct way. The result is neither pure abstraction nor simple landscape. It sits between the two, where the Arctic becomes both place and process.
A northern subject with lasting force
Christopher Baker’s Arctic work from 2017 remains compelling because it brings together experience, material, and method. The paintings carry the first encounter with a landscape shaped by long light and unstable horizons. The Midnight Sun carborundum prints then give that encounter a rougher, more physical form.
James Hamilton - Curator Writer ( Constable a Portrait, Turner A Life) Painter wrote:
"In the high summer of 2017, Christopher Baker took his board-bound sketchbook, 23 kilos and over a metre long, to Cummingøya in the Norwegian Arctic. Film on YouTube shows this bulky man labouring under its weight like a dung beetle in a crisis.
It was late June, but still temperatures could fall to minus degrees centigrade with wind-chill, and in any event Baker had to work very fast indeed before his paints froze…These paintings are neither impressionist nor expressionist, but collected ruminations of a contemplative mind caught in a restless body.
They are offspring of thought and feeling. We might cast about for parallels - Turner made comparable physical demands on himself; he knew the natures of extreme and discovered the sublime in creative chaos. 'I never lose an accident', Ruskin heard him say, while the protean Constable tells us that 'painting is but another word for feeling'.
While Baker says that, for him, 'painting is a way of life', he adds confusingly 'but I don't call myself a painter. I don't want to be in control. I want it to control me.' A pause is followed by a flash of insight which only the line Baker quotes from All's Well that Ends Well can illuminate: 'Simply the thing I am shall make me live'.… The Cummingøya sketchbook, all 23 kilos of it, contains Baker's expression of the rock, snow, ice and water that forms that forbidding ancient terrain. His dancing brushes, the one spark of life in this wilderness, evoke its emptiness, and makes manifest the enormity of the tasks that Baker has shouldered"
The project shows how printmaking can extend a painted idea rather than simply repeat it. In Baker’s hands, carborundum becomes a way to hold the Arctic’s contrasts: brightness and grit, distance and surface, stillness and pressure.
The takeaway is clear. These works matter because they do more than show a remote place. They ask what kind of image can carry the memory of the Arctic, and they answer through paint, ink, texture, and light.
Contact us to view any of the carborunduim prints or other paintings/prints by Christopher Baker.
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