Meet the Painter Couple Asking the Biggest Questions in Art Right Now

Richard Thomas Scott and Jordan Nobuko Baker are painters, partners, and — this summer — collaborators on Fantastic Refuge, a joint exhibition at La Galerie L’Oeil du Prince in Biarritz, France. The gallery’s name translates as “Eye of the Prince,” a French idiom for the theater’s best seat — the one from which the whole scene comes into view. It’s an apt metaphor for two painters whose work asks viewers to look harder, and see more deeply, than they might expect.

Richard Thomas Scott

Scott grew up in Georgia, earned his M.F.A. at the New York Academy of Art, and went on to work in the studios of Jeff Koons and Odd Nerdrum — a combination that tells you something about the range of his interests. He now teaches at the Savannah College of Art and Design, back in the South he once thought he’d left behind for good.

RICHARD THOMAS SCOTT, Vive la Résistance, 2026, oil on linen, 24 x 36 in.

His paintings draw on memory, dream, and reality — hovering between magical realism, symbolism, and romanticism — in service of questions he has spent his career asking: “Who are we, and how did we get here?”

Those questions are rooted in experience. A school shooting the day before his high school graduation. A violent alcoholic father. The loss of his mother to cancer, and his half-brother to COVID-19. Rather than paint those events directly, Scott comes at them obliquely — through myth, philosophy, and art history — finding images that carry emotional weight without collapsing into autobiography. “A great painting must have both intellectual content and emotional content,” he says, “because that is what seduces the viewer into the work and makes the intellectual content available.”

His newest paintings suggest a shift — from asking how we arrived at this moment to asking whether we can shape what comes next. “A more positive, even humorous, view in my critique,” he says, “balancing melancholy and optimism, envisioning a more optimistic future.”

RICHARD THOMAS SCOTT, Apollo: The Age of Reason, 2026, oil on linen, 40 x 30 in.

One new painting, Apollo, depicts the god of light and healing as a distinctly modern Black man striding forward. Another, Vive la Résistance, reimagines Napoleon’s famously undignified retreat from a horde of hungry domesticated rabbits. It is, in the best possible way, a lot of fun.

Jordan Nobuko Baker

Baker — one-quarter Chinese, one-quarter Japanese, and half Caucasian — brings a different kind of depth to her still life paintings, though the underlying questions feel just as urgent. Working in the vanitas tradition of 17th-century Dutch painting — those richly detailed arrangements of flowers, fruit, and skulls that remind viewers of life’s fragility — she has found a genre that feels newly relevant. “This tradition takes on additional meaning in a time when truth, values, and liberty are fleeting and impermanent,” she says, “just as fragile and vulnerable as the physical body.”

JORDAN NOBUKO BAKER (b. 1981), Vanitas: Mabon with Thomas Cole Pears, 2024, oil on canvas, 20 x 16 in.

Her newest work sets those meditations against Japanese and Chinese decorative screens, finding unexpected beauty in the tension between a meticulously rendered object in the foreground and the flattened patterns behind it. “It’s almost like time travel when you love something that someone in the past loved,” she says. “You’re tapping into some truth that is timeless and universal.”

Together, Scott and Baker make a remarkable pair — two painters asking the largest questions, in the most personal terms, with the full weight of art history at their backs.

JORDAN NOBUKO BAKER, Messenger of the Gods I, 2026, oil and 24-carat gold leaf on panel, 20 x 20 in., private collection

Scott and Baker’s work — ambitious, historically grounded, and unafraid of the big questions — is exactly the kind of art that Fine Art Connoisseur was made to cover. The full story, written by editor Peter Trippi, appears in the May/June 2026 issue of the magazine, which brings the same depth and seriousness to contemporary realism and representational art that these two painters bring to their canvases. If this introduction has left you wanting more — more context, more paintings, more insightful analysis — the full article is where to find it. Subscribe or learn more at FineArtConnoisseur.com.