Jerry Baron paints mostly on 56" by 48" canvas, and also on paper and masonite, all of which are primed with black gesso before use. He works in acrylics and oil bars.
His brushes are mostly synthetic nylon or hog hair. The paints are either
Utrecht or
Golden and as the artist himself notes: "I try not to interfere with the inherent integrity of paints; that is, their true color values."
Baron works in a small studio, upstairs in the historic Citizen's Building in North Bend, Oregon located but minutes from the Pacific Ocean.
The painter's habit is to go each morning to his studio where he works from about 8 a.m. to whatever time he chooses to quit for the day. He spends his afternoons relaxing, watching TV, or writing. He is a former newspaper man, rising from reporter to publisher.
Baron likes to let his work "evolve" as he paints. He does not so much paint a preconceived image as he does simply discovering the image, or images, as he works. Says the painter: "For me, painting is the process of discovery." Even when the artist does preconceive an image, that is to say draw it on the canvas as a beginning, his spontaneity remains in tact through his use of colors in the painting.
The painter has several sketch books from which he has taken various images and used in a painting. "All these many years, instead of taking photographs, I have sketched," says Baron. Two years ago he went on an extended camping trip to various states in the Pacific northwest and returned home with drawings he did of different mountain ranges, his favorite being the Cascade range.
When working with paper of different weights, Baron first tapes the paper to a huge piece of thick glass mounted into a wall at his studio. He wets the paper down and returns the next day to find it stretched and firm and ready to use. He often applies pastels or colored chalk willy-nilly (that is with specific forms in mind at all) and then rubs wet paper towels over the entire surface. The next morning he returns to "discover" what is in there, on that paper. Once he discovers one form or another, he begins painting from that original source.
