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Donald Maier
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Biography
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As a teenager in the 1960s, Don Maier began working in watercolor as a means of adding color notations to pencil sketches, which later became oil paintings as he worked in his bedroom at night. He became increasingly proficient at watercolor, enjoying the freedom of capturing an image on location in one sitting. A fast-drying medium, watercolor demands a rapid approach. Maier finds it very fulfilling to be able to walk away with a finished piece within one hour as opposed to when he works in oil or dry pastel, which required multiple sittings.
A native of New Jersey, Maier served in the Navy and fell in love with the western landscape while stationed in California. He made painting trips to Yosemite and the Californian desert. Following a move to San Francisco in 1975, Maier began to paint his favorite subjects - Arizona's deserts and national parks, particularly the Four Corners region, including Monument Valley and Canyon de Chelly.
Maier enjoys the challenges of painting in the desert: the aridity, the sand and wind, and the constantly changing cloud patterns on the ground. He does not spend a great deal of time thinking about his subjects, choosing instead to paint because he loves the process.
Since 1994, Maier has made Marietta his home. He paints Sope Creek near his house as well as continuing to travel in the West as often as possible. He admires the work of Frederick Remington, Andrew Wyeth, Winslow Homer, and John Singer Sargent. Maier has exhibited his work in several gallery exhibitions in New Jersey, California, and Arizona. A graduate of the Newark School of Fine & Industrial Arts, Maier taught Color & Design, Illustration, and Computer Graphics for nearly ten years at Bauder College in Atlanta.
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Statement
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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.
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Exhibitions
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2007 - Four Corners, Booth Western Art Museum, Cartersville, GA
2007 - Wild Ride Exhibition, Harris Art Center, Calhoun GA
2007 - One Man Show, Fayetteville Art Center
2008 - Three person show, Gallery 4463, Acworth, GA
2008 - One Man Show, Rome St. Gallery, Carrollton, GA
2009 - One Man Show, Coast to Coast, Carrollton Cultural Center, Carrollton, GA
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