"Which books to paint then?" Baker writes. "I began to think about books that had been important and life-changing for me, but which I now felt I could no longer return to—books that held great meaning for me as a youth but lacked the same impact upon rereading."

"As our personalities are changed (or not) by them, so too do they absorb impressions of our lives," Baker writes. "Each book becomes its own unique individual, most especially true of the lowly paperback."

"They come to stand for various episodes of our lives, for certain idealisms, follies of belief, moments of love," Baker writes. "Along the way they accumulate our marks, our stains, our innocent abuses—they come to wear our experience of them on their covers and bindings like wrinkles on our own skin."

"As physical objects they are powerful fetishes, icons, containers of every conceivable thought and/or emotion," Baker writes. "We cart them from home to work on our commutes and they accompany us on vacations. We move them carefully packed in boxes from one domicile to another, from one phase of life to another."

"For twenty years or so I have been committed to the painting of still life," Richard Baker writes. "I say 'still life' purely as a descriptive term—the associations conjured by its use seem limited and confining for my purposes. Many of my works from the previous ten years have commingled depictions of two-dimensional representations with diverse 'rendering' of three-dimensional forms—into these hybrid conglomerations I introduced images of books in 2004."