08-20-2023 Harford Magazine - Flipbook - Page 26
Right: Artist John Sauers and wife Jeanette at
their Darlington home.
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 knowhow 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
favorite 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.
“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 worst26
| Fall 2023 | harfordmagazine.com
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
