Master at work: John Sauers can’t put his brush down even at 90

Palette in hand, John Sauers sat at his easel, the swish of his brush strokes the only sound on the hushed Virginia mountainside. Suddenly, Sauers tensed. He felt eyes on him. Something was near, and watching.  “I turned slowly, and there they were — 14 turkeys, lined up in a row, all standing there looking at me,” the artist said. “I don’t know what they thought. I just kept painting.”

Sauers’ admirers range far and wide. At 90, the Darlington resident has exhibited in galleries throughout the country, won more than 20 awards and sold nearly 300 of his works for as much as $2,000. Last year, the Harford County Council honored Sauers as a Harford Living Treasure, a nod to his plein-air (outdoor) paintings and his penchant for mentoring others.

  Rustic scenes are favourite themes.

In a career spanning several generations, he has produced more than 2,200 paintings in oils and watercolours, as well as 2,500 sketches, in pencil and charcoal. Moreover, the soft-spoken, self-effacing nonagenarian is still at it, determined to capture the whimsy of nature on canvas, whatever the weather.

He has braved subfreezing temperatures, when the watercolours produced offbeat, crystal-like textures on his paintings. He has toiled in sleet storms where the icy droplets mixed with oils and gave his works a rare, gritty appearance. And he has painted in blustery 40-mph winds, anchoring his easel with two-by-fours to hold it firm.  It’s a craft Sauers says he will pursue to the end.

“I have 20-20 vision (since laser eye surgery) and no arthritis in my hands,” he said. “I told (the pastor), ‘Maybe I ought to slip a little extra in the offering plate.’ “

In 2020, while hospitalized with COVID-19 for nearly a month, he made drawings in his sketchbook to pass the time. “They’ll carry me out with a No. 6 brush in my hand,” he said.

  Artist John Sauers, 90, was named a ‘Harford County living treasure’ last year.

Sauers’ pluck inspires his peers, those who know him say. “John is a super trooper whose work ethic is contagious,” said Pam Wilde, of Abingdon, an award-winning plein-air artist. “You think, ‘If a 90-year-old man can get out there, then what’s my excuse?’ I went out painting with him one day and wound up doing a painting of him painting.

“His artwork is so spiritual. John has a great love and appreciation for the land, and it sings to his paintings. He’s not copying nature, he’s interpreting it. It’s coming through his filter — and what a beautiful filter it is.”  Moreover, Sauers happily shares his know-how of his craft, Wilde said: “He has been a mentor to me for many years. Being able to teach is an art in itself, and he’s a master at that, too.”

Born in 1933, Sauers was delivered at home, near Bel Air, as he likes to say, “in a hollow, next to the woods.” Rustic scenes are favourite themes: weathered barns that survive with pride, gnarly trees that cling to life, and woodland lanes that beg a line from Robert Frost. His signature subjects? Clouds. Crows. And bales of hay basking in a stubbled field.

  A one-minute sketch by 90-year-old artist John Sauers.

“The hay is a circular motif, a metaphor for our earth,” he said. The crow — often a singular bird in a landscape — is his spirit animal, an iconic figure in Sauers’ works. Clouds, the big, billowy kind, are almost a given and as fortuitous to capture as a rainbow.

“If a (cumulus) cloud struck now, I’d hustle out and get it down on something, even if I drew it on the back of a pizza box,” he said.  Married 66 years, his wife, Jeanette, is his muse, but nature is his mistress. “I’ve mentored groups of students who’ve come out (in a field) all dressed up in their smocks, with easels, ready to paint,” he said. “The first thing I say is, ‘Don’t touch your brush, just study. Look down at your feet and see all of the creepy, crawly things there are on the earth that sustains us.’ That gives them a perspective on the life force that we walk on but (to which) we pay no attention.”

Clouds aside, Sauers works with maddening deliberation. “I’m a plodder,” he said. “There’s no landscape I paint that I have not mentally studied for at least four years. That’s the way my poor old mind functions.”

Many times, he paints on site; others, he files as mental snapshots, to be done in his studio in an old barn, amid a clowder of cats, at his 19th-century Victorian home.  Sauers has painted all his life. In second grade, for an art assignment, he was asked to draw a bird. “The teacher told me I had the worst-looking bird in class,” he recalled. “She may have been right.” At Bel Air High, his efforts excelled and, on graduation in 1951, he received a state senatorial scholarship to what is now the Maryland Institute College of Art. Degree complete, Sauers found work as a graphic artist with Baltimore Gas & Electric, doing ad layouts and other corporate stuff.

At lunch, he walked city streets, sandwich in one hand and sketchbook in the other, unobtrusively dashing off drawings of historic neighborhoods ( Fells Point, Little Italy), the rebirth of the Inner Harbor and the original Pride of Baltimore, before it sank in 1986. Several of Sauers’ sketches appeared on the op-ed pages of The Baltimore Sun.  Retiring in 1989, he moved to Whitetop, Virginia, where he honed his landscape skills and tutored others near the artsy town of Abingdon, from which his forebears came. Sauers reveled in the sylvan setting, often ascending great heights to paint vistas along the Appalachian Trail.

“Once, I was working just below the summit of a 5,200-foot peak when, to my right, out of nowhere comes an Air Force plane — a B-52, I think — doing mountain-terrain training,” he said. “There I was, looking down into the cockpit and waving to the pilot.”

Tribune News Service