Chase Baker (b. 2000) is a Baltimore-based painter working in oil, currently studying at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

His work includes figure, landscape, still life, and interior, painted from life, imagination, and often some combination of the two. Regardless of subject, the central concerns are consistent: light, color temperature, and the relationship between warm and cool tones.

A recurring interest in his work is presence and how painting can approximate it. Working directly from life is the most straightforward version of this, but memory can carry something of the same quality, and the space between the two is where much of his work lives. A painting made partly from observation and partly from recollection is not a compromise so much as its own mode, one that can be as faithful to an experience as anything made on the spot.

Chase is also engaged with the study of traditional realist technique, including classical approaches to form, value, and paint handling. Rather than an end in itself, this study functions as a foundation, a set of tools and ways of seeing that inform how he approaches his own work, which is often less concerned with strict fidelity to the subject than with what the painting can do on its own terms.