Oregon painter Jerry Baron was raised in upstate New York. As a boy he loved camping and fly fishing along the rivers and lakes of the state. He was voted class artist by his high school peers and received a letter of recommendation from his art teacher to attend Pratt Institute in New York City. Instead, he enlisted and served four years in the Air Force, two and a half of which was spent as a reporter in the Far East. In 1956 Baron enrolled at UC in Berkeley where he studied Japanese three years. In 1962 he took a job as a journalist for a weekly Oregon newspaper and the next year moved to Coos Bay with his family and worked at The World, a daily newspaper on the southern Oregon Coast. He finished his last eight years with the paper as publisher.
He began painting part time in 1980 at a studio he rented on Saunders Lake and by 1989 resigned his post at the newspaper to devote full attention to his art. Baron got his start in the early 80s at the 210 Second Street Gallery in Bandon and after several years of trying to get into the Portland gallery scene he succeeded, first showing his works at Raindance Gallery in the Pearl District, a famous art district in the city. He exhibited works at Raindance, Forecast and Jamison-Thomas galleries over a period of 14 years, spending the last six years with Vita, one of the more prominent galleries in the Pearl.
Baron has also shown paintings in Seattle, Cannon Beach, Sunriver, Bandon, Coos Bay, Florence, Eugene, Portland University, and in Idaho, California and Montana and sold paintings in the U.S. and abroad. He was most recently one of the artists featured at Opus 6IX gallery across from the Hult Center.
He now works in his small studio upstairs in the historic Citizen's Building in North Bend.