Artist Charming Baker is gunning for glory

Charming Baker has had a string of international sell-out shows, his fans include Damien Hirst, British collector Frank Cohen, gallerist Harry Blain and New York dealer Alberto Mugrabi (who owns the world's largest Warhol collection), and his prices are going through the roof. So when he says, 'Sometimes I think why don't I find a simpler way to make a living and become a plumber?' I wonder if he's being ironic.

Baker's work is simultaneously beautiful and disturbing. In Conversation Piece (Shot In The Arse), a woman lies with her back to us, half-laced corset falling open, a target and bullet hole in her bottom, a jagged rent in the canvas. 'It was quite a nice painting but I felt it needed livening up,' he grins. A painting of a child who appears to be plummeting to his death, caught upside down midflight, is called Falling Boy (The Descent into Mediocrity). He also paints fights, often between people and animals, and depicts macho subjects like boats and helicopters as delicately as living creatures. In I've Surprised Myself by Coming to Terms with the End of the World, a clutch of helicopters are presented tails together, like a flower or a snowflake; in Every Safety Net Has a Hole In It, a cargo ship appears to have caught fire.

His work is figurative, painterly and traditional, yet even the prettiest, pink-bowed bunny, resonates with unease; what appear to be tiny bubbles floating around the rabbit's neck are in fact the imprints of shrapnel. 'A 12-bore makes a good old hole and there's a spatter of pellets, it's another mark, adding something, a pattern of violent destruction.' Baker's reputation as an 'urban artist' is probably down to his penchant for shooting his work with a shotgun and his use of mark-making, inspired by the boards retrieved from skips, often drilled with holes, that he painted on before he could afford canvases.

He works outside the gallery system, with a team of managers and promoters, but says he has no problem with galleries, he'd just 'rather drink in a pub than a VIP lounge.' Pat Magnarella, one of America's most successful music managers (Green Day; Goo Goo Dolls) has been behind Baker since 2009, promoting him in the same way he promotes bands. Shows are publicised like a record campaign, via fly posters, postcards and emails, and the private views are rock and roll: hip venues, club DJs, a proper bar and the beau monde in attendance.

As a result, Baker, aged 47, has found himself with a stellar career as an artist whose work fetches upwards of £40,000 and a modelling contract as the face of Paul Smith London. 'I met an old friend at a wedding who asked me if I fancied modelling,' he says. 'I said I'd do it for suits. But actually, I'd already thought of working with Paul Smith, as he collects art and it seemed to be the perfect marriage. His look is so English and I'm very grassroots - my art is all muted colours and understated sensibility, I embrace those dreary British things like the weather, the bleak pub humour. I find it all intrinsically romantic.' Smith photographed Baker for the campaign himself and has also underwritten a short film about the artist. 'I'm an ambassador for the brand. It's like having a patron. So now I get the same discount as David Beckham.' (He can't resist adding, '40 per cent'.) Childhood friends from Ripon in North Yorkshire, 'who all work at power stations, come and stay and say "F***ing hell, one of us made it, brilliant!"'

Alan Baker's nickname 'Charming' comes from the time he and his friends would all go on holiday as teenagers and 'it was always me sent to ask for rooms at guesthouses. We were a wild bunch but I was known as the sweet-talker. It's very Ripon to have a nickname - my brother's called Pud.' Baker's father was in the army which meant 'many different schools and different friends. Different houses, too, but Mum's front room was always the same.' When they settled in Yorkshire, Baker was 12. 'It was like a Carry On movie. Everyone had very defined roles: Dad in the army, Mum was a nurse and my uncle had a bread round.' What he remembers most vividly, though, is his Auntie Audrey's front room, which 'smelt of bacon, eggs and cups of tea. There were patterned wallpapers and carpets and antimacassars' - retro interiors that are reiterated in the backgrounds of his paintings.

As a working-class lad who left school at 15 to become a road digger, a career as a plumber might have made sense. But Auntie Audrey's postcards from her trips to London filled him with a longing to live in the capital. 'I'd pass through on my holidays and it felt like home. I couldn't wait to get here.' He'd always loved to paint, but couldn't imagine how that would lead to a job, so decided to become a commercial artist and got onto the Graphic Design course at Central Saint Martins, aged 21. Years of odd jobs at magazines and work as a teacher at his alma mater followed. He painted portraits at home in his ex-council flat in south London, married and looked after the children while his wife worked. 'Then the kids grew up, I remarried and it seemed like the right time. You get to a point where you want to talk and I found the language.'

In early 2006, graffiti art enthusiast Tim Fennell heard about Baker's work and turned up at his flat. 'He bought five pieces that were under my bed and offered me a show at the Truman Brewery.' The East End show sold out and Fennell became Baker's manager. But it was in 2008, when Baker was asked to join a debate on urban art in LA, that his world really changed. Roger Klein, creative director for Magnarella, flagged up Baker's work and Magnarella flew to London to meet the artist. 'He took me out to dinner and said "What do you want, how can I help?"' He then put his music publicity machine into action and organised a sell-out Shoreditch show. Klein, meanwhile, bumped into a friend of Damien Hirst's at the Groucho club and Hirst got interested too, turning up at Baker's next show, in New York, and buying in bulk. Cohen, Blain and Mugrabi also appeared and bought several works apiece: prices had risen from £3,000 to between £12,000 and £16,500. 'That show provided an inkling of what could happen,' says Baker. 'I had to get VAT registered.'

When Fennell called from the London Art Fair in January, to say he'd sold a rabbit painting for £40,000, he says 'my wife and I sat in silence. Now I'm that cliché; I can't afford my own art.' Not that he minds. 'What's great is the idea that I'm not on my own, that somebody gets my work. I don't care who doesn't like it: the fact that someone is spending money is affirming, I can just get on with it.'

Baker certainly takes risks, not only painting 'dogs and boats and rabbits that could be ridiculed,' but with the new darkness that pervades his latest work. 'There's a lot of death in this show,' he admits. Why? 'Because it's looming. I see my parents getting old. Of course death poses the question of whether it's worth doing anything, but the answer is yes, because the moment is intensely important: the present transcends all knowledge of dark stuff.' As the father of a nearly-16-year-old, he's also keenly aware of the mortal danger of youth. In Not All The Things I Have Are All The Things I Want, he has painted two dead 'junky lovers' taken from forensic photographs posted online as warnings by bereaved parents. 'Forensic photos have such beauty, clarity, they hide nothing.' Having layered paint onto the canvas, he then scraped most of it off, leaving no flesh, just clothes, 'the crap they leave behind, the trainers. I must write to the parents' he trails off.

He and his wife have five children, two each from previous marriages and one between them. His step-daughter is one of his best models, she features in several paintings and allowed herself to be covered in goo to make some of the 18 busts for this month's show, Every Thing Must Go. 'The boys aren't as good, they wriggle and fidget,' he says. The child busts wear animal masks, polished to look like bronze. 'The masks are cultural ephemera, cheap tat, but turn them bronze and put them on a plinth and they're something in a Greek temple. I like to show things in different ways.'