A.D. Greer

Untitled

As in the case of most artists, their art is not the initial sole source of income; most have “day” jobs that give them the freedom to create. In Mr. Greer’s case, his prolific career choice vocations as a trained boxer; a Michelangelo-influenced church dome painter; a sign, water tower, smokestack and car painter; field worker; railroad maintenance man; logger; and muralist- all attributed to his success as a fine art artist and well-respected landscape painter.

 Born in the Oklahoma Territory in 1907; back in an era and age that saw the dissolution of the Indian Territories of that geographical region and the formal establishment of the State of Oklahoma, his earliest childhood experiences would be charged with overwhelming landscapes and rolling plains. Something retained and stored in a nostalgic physiological state, only to erupt out, cementing his mid-career artistic signatures.

As a sort of visual jack of all trades, conveyor of ideas, showman, extrovert, and ringmaster; Greer led an artistic landscape painting charge that had not been seen before- a prelude to his successful artistic career. Painting scenery backdrops for a theater company he perfected his craft through an alternative visual means.  Furthermore, beig influenced by friends who were fine art painters as well as the Texas masters of the time like Porfinio Salinas, Greer produced landscape paintings of the Grand Canyon and Yosemite National Park in a dreamy and quixotic approach unlike any other.

With an artistic career that spanned more than 50 years, Greer’s legacy exists not in the amount of work, but in the quality. Knowing the clientele’s buying habits and general market of his work, Greer could appease any interested party with a “sliding scale” of affordability- while maintaining a certain grandiose aesthetic.

The untitled gorge and canyon painting dating 1985 has Greer’s career is in its later esteemed stages. His signature picturesque landscapes are well established as high-quality fine art; as found in the collectors’ circles throughout Texas and the Southwest. 

Here he presents the viewer with an edgy mindfully centered vertigo that lingers down into the coniferous trees below. Angled boulders and rocks line the wide open fissure leading into the infinite cerulean abyss. An unseen light source hidden by the mountain ridges on the left emanates a fading sun; spotlighting the vistas, ridges, and mountains in the ranges miles away. Sporadic clouds dance across the sky, leaping from plateau to plateau in a kind of artistic landscape choreography  drawing our eye from background to mid-ground. Obtuse triangles of misaligned trees help balance out the foreground, bringing the focal point to the center of the painting. A dreary mist engulfs the scenic view, copulating us into his artistic reverie.

-© Gabriel Diego Delgado

Available for sale at the San Antonio location of J.R. Mooney Galleries of Fine Art