Note Type
Antony Hayton, Exhibit DirectorNote
Hezekiah Baker (1940-2007)
Rio Mar Beach Scene
Oil on Masonite circa 1980
Image size 24" X 36"
Rio Mar is an Atlantic Ocean beach in the town of Vero Beach. It became a choice scene for Highwaymen artists to paint, recreated by various group members hundreds of times. The first artist to paint the scene would have been Harold Newton, but his mentor, A. E. Backus, also created the scene. A "Rio Mar" scene is characterized by crashing waves along an unspoiled stretch of the Atlantic Ocean with windblown palms rising out of a grassy bluff of sand on the right-hand side. At times, artists in the group would switch up and paint the scene from the opposite side with the sandy buff and palm trees on the left side. Rio Mar was painted at night, at sunrise, and any time in between, and with various clouds and colors. Because it sold so well, the artists continued to paint it; it was a guaranteed sale and made them money.
Hezekiah Baker was the third artist to join the group after Harold Newton and Roy McLendon and before Alfred Hair. "We improvised from something in our mind." That's what Hezekiah Baker told the New York Times in a 2001 interview, an interview that was notable not only for its content but also for the fact that it occurred in the first place for Baker had come a long way from being born to sharecropping parents in Savannah, Georgia, in 1940, and being fortunate when he was a young man to become a member of the Florida Highwaymen group.