One Man Exhibition
Newspaper Article, The Star Johannesburg, Friday June 23, 1967, “How Music Influences An Artist”.
Marshall Baron of Bulawayo, visiting Johannesburg for his one-man exhibition which opens this evening, is an artist, law graduate and music critic. Music, he says, influences him greatly in the flow of colour and rhythm in his paintings.
Two years ago, while on a holiday visit to the United States, he learned that he was related to Ben Shahn, whom he describes as “one of the greats of the century”.
He met Shahn, found him friendly and encouraging, and through this contact was able to enroll in the summer school at Skowhegan in Maine, where he had tuition from Shahn and other important artists.
“The name Skowhegan is American Indian. It is a beautiful spot beside a lake. We lived and worked there the whole summer”, he said.
“The emphasis – when I was there, at any rate – was on conservatism, but this only reinforced my feeling that abstractionism is for me the valid way of expressing myself in paint. I find it infinitely challenging to make the paint work out its own statements without falling back on images.”
This is 32-year-old Baron’s second one-man show in Johannesburg. He first entered his paintings for a university group exhibition while he was studying law. There was favourable comment on his work and it encouraged him to go on.
He likes to work in a variety of med – oil paints, acrylics, collage or paint combined with plaster. He sometimes paints vast canvases, sometimes small ones.
He has studied the piano since childhood but calls himself a bad pianist. He writes music criticisms for a Bulawayo paper.
