Don Maier
Artist's Statement
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.
Luckily, back then you could take art classes in High School and I absorbed all I could in 4 years. There I first tried watercolors, at first using them only to make color notations on pencil sketches for oils. Gradually I eliminated all pencil drawing and began blocking in large areas of color, isolating the white space, often becoming the paintings focal point.
This is a fast medium, lending itself to painting on location, demanding a rapid approach. There’s nothing like being there and it is very satisfying to be able to walk away with a finished piece within an hour.. It also helps give the paintings a sense of place that is hard to achieve when working from photographs.
An impatient person when I’m painting, I love the desert for doing watercolors, because one does not have to wait long for the water to dry on the paper so you can proceed to the next step. In fact a wet into wet technique is a real challenge there. Also, the wind and sand and constantly changing cloud patterns on the ground offer a real challenge to the artist.
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 inspiration to me as well, since he inspired my interest in western landscape and the desert. It wasn’t until 1975 when I moved to the San Francisco area, that I had a chance to paint the locations that would later become my favorite subjects. The desert, the cactus, the National Parks and the Navajo Tribal Parks of Canyon de Chelly and Monument Valley became my passion.
In 1994 I moved to Georgia and taught Illustration, Graphic Design and Color & Design at Bauder College until 2006. I began painting local scenes of streams, autumn foliage, palm trees and wildlife in Florida, but my real love is Arizona. I still go there whenever I can since it is only about 6 hours longer to drive there than it did when I lived in San Francisco. In 2006 I began showing my work in online art galleries and have had more exposure and attention than ever before. Most recently 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.
