Carl Niederer

After an education as a painter at the University of Oregon and study at the Atelier Fernand Leger in Paris, Carl Niederer started out in New York as a design apprentice in the offices of Russel Wright Associates. His work there was in textile design and the color coordination of home furnishing products. Watercolor was used as a media for depicting new product ideas, but he didn't consider it real painting.

By 1960 Carl Niederer had left a going practice in industrial design in New York and traveled to Japan, Macao, and Fiji painting watercolors on location. He then settled in San Francisco to work as an industrial designer. Among the projects he worked on were carpet designs, mural and sculpture commissions, electric sign designs, and plastic pattern making for reusable concrete casting molds.

But San Francisco was all around - and it was visually stimulating scenery. None of the industrial designing enhanced the appreciation of this potential. The nearest thing to such appreciation was the design of electric signs where the drawing of watercolor renderings would demonstrate how each sign fitted its neighborhood. By 1962, Carl began showing watercolors of San Francisco and the Oregon coast at H.P. Corwith Ltd. Gallery on Union Street, and kept doing his variety of industrial designing. Finally, he arrived at working on computer plots with the last of the large ferromagnetic computers. This was ten years before PCs.

This odd combination of watercolor and early computer interest led to his becoming Head of the Art Department at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. The University setting offered more opportunities to experiment, to do large watercolors, to travel and to read. In the summer of 1985, on a trip to prepare for a sabbatical in England, he went out on the streets of New York with his kit of equipment to do full sheet watercolors. Carl Niederer has painted images of Australia, New York, San Francisco, Japan, Fiji, and Macao, and has had an active life of watercolor exhibitions and large installation commissions.

Niederer began making summer painting trips to the Oregon coast to paint the dunes as early as 1947. His watercolors of the Florence area have not been widely exhibited here, however he has had several shows of large, unstretched canvases (he calls tattered canvas) at the Triad Gallery in Seal Rock, Oregon. His subjects in watercolor range from sand dunes and beaches to paintings of mothers and their children playing on the beaches, to still-lifes of pears when they are still hanging from the tree, "before dropping to the ground to become nourishment for the bees." And his style ranges from traditional representational to his current mathematically precise geometric abstractions. He is a mixed media artist, working in several mediums.