Donald Maier

For more than 50 years I have been calling myself an artist. It began on my tenth Christmas in 1957 when my father gave me an oil paint set. I used up some of the colors and all of the canvas boards and needed more supplies. So I began going door to door to sell my paintings for $25 dollars around the block where I lived in Shark River Hills, New Jersey. Someone took pity on me and bought my first painting and that’s really all I have wanted to do ever since.

I first used watercolor only to make color notations on pencil sketches for oils. I realized that the pencil line inhibited the brush stroke, so gradually I eliminated all pencil drawing and began blocking in large areas of color, isolating the white space, often becoming the painting’s focal point. As a young man, and being inspired by Winslow Homer, one of my first watercolor trips was to his home state of Maine.

I remember waiting for over an hour for my paper to dry as I tried to paint on the foggy coastline. Thank goodness Fredrick Remington was also an influence to me inspiring my interest in western landscape and the desert. This is a fast medium, lending itself to painting on location and demanding a rapid approach. There’s nothing like being there, in the moment, capturing the feel of the location. It also helps give the paintings a sense of place that is hard to achieve when working from photographs because the limited tonal range of a photograph cannot match what the human eye can adjust to and see. An impatient person when I’m painting, I love the desert for plein air painting because one does not have to wait long for the water to dry on the paper allowing you to proceed to the next step to achieve a hard edge. In fact a wet into wet technique is a real challenge there.

Also, battling time and the elements of wind and sand and having a sense of urgency with constantly changing cloud patterns on the ground offer a real challenge to the artist. In 1994 I moved from California to Atlanta, Georgia and taught at Bauder College until 2006. I enjoyed painting at our local Sope Creek during the Autumn months and realized how much I missed the change of seasons. I was featured at the Booth Western Art Museum in Cartersville, GA, in spring of 2007 with an exhibit titled “Four Corners”, some 29 watercolors, most were painted on location during a painting trip to the area in 2006. I still go to Arizona and New Mexico whenever I can since it is only about 6 hours longer to drive there than it did when I lived on the San Francisco Peninsula.