ABOUT
Montage: “ The technique of producing a new composite whole from fragments of pictures, text or music”
A picture becomes a composite by combining several distinct images , or fragments of images, so they blend with or into one another.
An assembly of small details
A reviewer of my work wrote: “his work is intellectually creative. Images of what you saw are reassembled creating an image of its own in an altered perspective. The sky is blue but many blues, one bridge is two bridges, buildings are stretched and reshaped.
It teases the eye; the rearrangements are dynamic, seem to move across the canvas, almost pulsate.
It crunches the mind: what is real in the assembled images are seen as not real, but a recreation of what you saw, or didn’t see.”
My assemblages combine fragments of photos combined with paint and borrowed pieces from here and there. I am interested in capturing a point of view which is expanded beyond what the eye sees. I think what we see is at first whole, but then, as the eye wanders, is fragmented into an infinite number of small pieces. That’s what I enjoy, assembling small pieces into an unforeseen whole.
Ron Baers is an architect, urban designer and imaginer. Born in Honolulu, Hawaii during World War II, he has travelled the globe for 80 years, for work, adventure and to discover art. From big city to country village, he searches for surprise in all places big and small, and seeks to understand and capture in montage the unique human qualities that abound.
TESTIMONIALS
I was admiring the many pieces of art created by Ron displayed in his home, hoping to find
something that would fill the void of a large unadorned wall in my den, when I saw a small print
of an early work by him tucked away in a bedroom. It caught my eye because of the vibrant
colors and the recognizable scene–the umbrella installation by Cristo and Jeanne-Claude in
California in 1991. I always admired their larger-than-life art installations, remembered the
installation in California, and really liked Ron’s interpretation.
Ron lent me the print and I loved how it looked in our space. In fact, I wanted to make it a focal
point. There was a problem, however; the scale of the piece was far too small. I conferred with
Ron and he assured me the piece could be professionally printed to a larger size without a loss of
clarity or quality. Still, to be proportional to the space intended, the piece would have to be quite
large. I decided that breaking it into a tryptic would be most visually interesting. Ron agreed it
lent itself to that treatment and off to the printer it went. It was a nervous reveal when I received
the large, separate pieces and installed them in the room, having only seen the work in small
scale before. The result, however, was exactly as we hoped–a beautiful piece of art with a
wonderful original story.
