FINDING A LIKENESS

The celebrated novelist tries his hand at visual art.

In 2019, after Baker finished Baseless, a nonfiction book about “horrible government programs that happened in secret a long time ago,” he “was wiped out. I needed a rehabilitation program. A less bleak way of looking at the world.” He set out to learn about artists with which he was unfamiliar and “try to master some of their techniques.” This handsome art book, amply illustrated with photos of subjects he drew and reproductions of paintings he copied, is the result. The author begins in a chatty style that emulates a children’s tale: “Hi, this is me. Welcome to my book Finding a Likeness.” From there, he documents the multiyear self-directed course that began in 2019 with Baker watching instructional YouTube videos, buying how-to-paint books, and turning to Pinterest, which was “uncannily good” at helping him discover artists. The narrative describes in detail the artistic activities that Baker, who lives in Maine, pursued over the next two years, from the four-day plein-air workshop in Camden, where his instructor passed along advice he had received (“Open your damn eyes!”); to his brief obsession with painting clouds, the “puffy, huge, lunglike, breathing, hippopotami of the sky”; and the online courses he took once the pandemic began. The book gets monotonous after a while—Baker tried this technique, then this one, then this one—but he is a witty guide, open about his failures and stumbles. For example, he says about his attempt to draw former New Yorker editor Harold Ross, “I tried twice and stopped. I’d made him look like a boxing promoter”; about his drawing of James Marcus, former editor of Harper’s, he says he looked “stretched, a little like Beavis in Beavis and Butt-Head.”

An amiable journey through an author’s attempts at mastering art.