Frans Baake is Dutch artist creating handmade books since 1982.Artists books are the main area of his work.
His main materials used in order to produce work are woodcuts, photographs, drawings and cloth-binding materials.
He draws his inspiration from visiting islands mostly.
His works have been collected in Netherlands, USA, Germany, Great Britain, Belgium, Norway, Finland, Lithuania, Hungary, Austria, France and Canada.
“For years Frans Baake travels to islands, especially foggy and windy ones. During these journeys he makes sketchings, photographs, notes. Based on these travels he usually makes printings and artists’ books. He often prints, binds and publishes these books in a small edition. Books and printings with photographs, woodcuts, collages, texts, associations.
It is mainly the shape of the naked landscape itself that attracts him.
In several years he visited f.i. the Aleutians, Falklands, St. Pierre & Miquelon, Iceland, Faroes en Tierra del Fuego.
On the Aleutians, situated in Bering Sea and belonging to the State of Alaska, he found a rapidly dissapearing culture with a mixture of Inuit- and Russian influences, dressed up in an American athmosphere.
Falkland Islands he visited 10 years after the conflict with Argentina. Most interesting point of view to him was the distance from these barren group of islands to England, being its motherland.
The island of Miquelon belongs to French Overseas department St. Pierre & Miquelon (situated off Newfoundland-coast), and is connected with the island of Langlade. Both islands are connected through a sandy isthmus on which a lot of ships have stranded in the last centuries, forming a real graveyard.
So every island has a meaning of itself to him.
Frans Baake also wrote travelstories about his visits to these and other places. They got published in several Dutch magazines like Voyager, GrandTour, Great!Britain and AmericA.
The books he made can be found in several collections.
The also found their way into international collections of, for instance, the Museum of the Book in The Hague (Netherlands), Centre Pompidou Paris, Victoria & Albert Museum London and the Museum of Modern Art New York. ”
His works:
Halbinsel 2014
End of 2012/beginning of 2013 Baake made a series of drawings made by a blue marker.
Half drawings in fact, mainly dictated by the oblong size of the paper, forming parts of landscape-based elements. The German word ‘Halbinsel’ means ‘Peninsula’ and strictly spoken it also means ‘Half Island’. The book has two identical covers; the information is split into two parts and can be looked at from both sides.
Cover in light blue velvet; text in red with letterpress; 48 drawings, reproduced in colour copy; Size: 15,5 x 21,6 cms; Edition of 10 copies, signed and numbered on one side. £ 50
Views of the last spider on the edge of the world 2015
Recently Baake’s daughter Anne went to South-Africa. She successfully conquered her fear for spiders. As to prove it she put a pretty large one on the map on the wall. The spider itself crawled all over, freely crossing oceans and continents. Baake gave his reaction in the form of a black and white linocut that he printed on the photographs that came out of the act.
Diptych captured in blue velvet that contains colour-copied pictures; In combination with black and white linocut; Size: 23 x 41 cms. (folded); Edition of 8 copies, signed and numbered on the front; Enschede-NL 2015. £ 86
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