![]() I’ve even done a Peeps painting, which is also iconic. “I put the Stingray and Captain America into the celebrity category because one is the best-known bike and the other the most-known show car. Maier considers that thoroughbred horse as much a celebrity as many of his other subjects. Similar subjects include Mick Jagger, Willy Nelson, Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan.Īlso tucked away in Maier’s studio is a 14-foot-long painting of the Triple Crown-winning racehorse American Pharoah, shown at speed with jockey astride him. That ultra-high resolution C-print, done on a Plexiglas panel, might be big, but the original in Maier’s studio is 3 feet higher. The 80-inch tall “Under My Thumb” rendering of Keith Richards is a prime example. The latest subjects that Maier has taken his brush to are celebrities. But I don’t use fine brushes, just flat profile or chisel points, and I work very fast with them, building up maybe 75 or so layers,” he says. “That rabbit painting uses some of the finest brushwork done in collaboration with spray and brush strokes. Maier’s softer side also is revealed in his paintings of a panda bear and a brown and white rabbit. There’s an uncanny sense of softness in the bird’s feathers, which Maier captures with as much skill as he does the hard, hot chrome of a motorcycle. Maier has detailed his haughty subject right down to its liquid eyes and semi-transparent beak. It’s virtually indistinguishable from the original painting,” he says.Ī painting of a rooster bursts with attitude. “It’s a different type of C-print with a special adhesive that allows it to adhere to the Plexiglas. That Holstein’s snout actually looks wet in part due to a new process he recently developed using Plexiglas as the substrate. Maier’s animals are as realistic as his automotive subjects. “I started with the automotive stuff because that was a natural progression, but I knew I could expand, so I started going with animals and, more recently, celebrity subjects,” he says. Whereas most Photorealists tend to find a single channel and stick with it - Richard Estes’ cityscapes or David Cone’s movie houses, for example - Maier is willing to experiment with different subject matter and media. A smaller version of the ‘Vette painting done over a brushed aluminum panel takes the process even further, providing an even deeper metallic sheen. The close-up views give the impression that Maier actually is working on a real car. Their semi-transparent quality over the reflective base is what gives the paintings their stunning luminous quality.Ī seven-minute video in the exhibit takes the viewer step-by-step through the creation of the Stingray painting, start to finish. Maier is the only artist they give them to. But in his case, the substrate is aluminum and the paints are an experimental formula by Axalta, formerly DuPont. Maier’s technique is sort of a hi-tech version of the classical egg tempera process, in which semi-transparent layers of paint are built up on a white gesso board. ![]() ![]() The National Museum of Industrial History is hosting an exhibit of the ‘Impossibly Real’ art of Peter Maier Those gleaming chrome exhaust headers on his iconic, life-size painting of a 1959 Stingray will blow you away as much as the liquid-like eyes of his roosters and rabbits. “Impossibly real” is how New York art critic Barbara MacAdam has described Maier’s work. ![]() Rendering animals, and humans for that matter, is a relatively new venture for Maier, who is mostly known for his stunning paintings of automotive subjects. If anything is unusual about that painting of a cow … er, bull …, it’s not that it’s hanging in an industrial history museum rather than an art gallery. “And anyway, most cows are production machines - they make milk, and that’s part of industry, right?” “Actually, it’s a bull, not a cow,” says Maier, who ended up at the museum through one of those friend of a friend stories. Seventeen of his remarkable works on hi-tech aluminum panels, Plexiglas and paper are on display through March 11 in this unlikely venue. Yet surreal is an apt description of the shockingly realistic art of painter Peter Maier. Walk through the entrance of the National Museum of Industrial History in Bethlehem, past the steam engines, gasoline engines, machine tools and assorted nuts and bolts, and suddenly you’re face-to-face with a huge, lifelike portrait of … a cow? A Holstein among all that hardware - it’s positively surreal.
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