ROBERT PIERCE
• Leader & Times
At the age of 17, Dallas Mayer began taking art lessons in the town of Hardesty, Okla., from Dord Fitz, a circuit art teacher from Shattuck, Okla., who traveled through Beaver County, Okla., and Texas County, Okla., as well as parts of Kansas, Texas and New Mexico.
Fitz had also taught the woman who would become Mayer’s mother-in-law in 1959 when her future husband was a baby, and Mayer said it was her mother-in-law who got her into art.
“At the time, I was married and a senior in high school, and she thought I needed something to fill my time, so I started taking classes from him,” she said. “I took classes from him until he passed away, and I started taking from his student, Jack Sorenson, who is a Cowboy Artist of America now.”
Mayer took art lessons from both Fitz and Sorenson in Liberal, and it was also in Liberal where she met Sorenson.
“Jack became my mentor and my teacher through the years, and I’m still in contact with Jack,” she said. “I paint with him. I try to get down there monthly to the Palo Duro Canyon, and he lives on the rim of the canyon.”
At one time, Mayer had an art gallery in Amarillo, Texas, and her beneficiary, Ann Crouch, helped many area artists, including herself, open their own studios and galleries.
Mayer said Crouch is just one of several teachers she has gotten lessons from over throughout her journey as an artist.
“Right now, I’m taking a Zoom class from Ned Mueller from Seattle,” she said. “Ned is 84 years old. I met him in Amarillo. He came to Amarillo to give art lessons.”
Mayer said as her journey continues, so does her learning.
“I try to be better than I was last year,” she said. “I try to grow as an artist. I’m my own best competition. I sell my art. I price it by the square inch, but it’s not important for me to sell it. It’s just important for me to paint and to get my ideas out there.”
Mayer too has a connection to the founder of Liberal’s Baker Arts Center, Irene Baker, whom she said she even took an art class with under Fitz’s guidance.
“She was an interesting lady,” Mayer said. “I toured her house one day after art class, and that was an experience. She loved art, and she had a vision for Liberal in art at the time. She was telling my mother-in-law and myself about it and had wanted Anna to help with that project.”
The learning continues with Mueller, a former illustrator with Disney.
“He’s a fantastic teacher, and I really enjoy taking lessons from him,” Mayer said.
Mayer said she too plans to take a class from Kansas teacher Linda Gooch, whom she had taken a class from previously when she was in her 20s.
“I believe she’s just a little older than I am,” Mayer said. “She’s living in Scottsdale, Ariz., now. I’ll be taking a class on Zoom with her on clouds. With Linda being from Kansas, she sure knows how to paint clouds., so I’m hoping to learn some things.”
One of Mayer’s latest works portrays the Battle of Buffalo Wallow, part of the Red River War which celebrated its 150th anniversary earlier this year.
“My husband and I are very interested in history, and he started portraying and re-enacting Billy Dixon in some of his battles like the Second Battle of Adobe Walls,” she said. “He’s done several programs. He wanted me to paint this painting for 20 years. With this being the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Buffalo Wallow and the Red River War, I thought this would be the year to do it.”
Mayer said she and a friend began traveling around to interview people and think about the Battle of Buffalo Wallow project.
“She has put together a documentary, and I have painted the painting,” she said. “It’s exciting we’re finally attained our goal. I am happy with my piece. It’s called ‘Exposed.’”
Coincidentally, one of Mayer’s favorites things to paint are buffaloes.
“There’s something about cattle also, and I think it’s because I was raised on a ranch,” she said. “I’ve actually been chased by a buffalo and barely escaped that on two different occasions. There’s something about painting the landscape here. It goes on and on forever.”
Mayer said she likes to show distance in her works.
“That’s something with people who aren’t from here, it scares them when they come,” she said.
Through painting landscapes and being outside in the fresh air, Mayer said she is able to capture a ring of truth to what she is painting.
“You’re capturing the shadows, the light, the colors,” she said. “You’re capturing the day, the sunshine, the wind and the clouds. On a cloudy day, your shadows are warm, and on a sunny day, they’re just the opposite. They’re cool.”
Mayer said all of what she has learned through painting over the years comes together when she is in front of the canvas.
“I follow the nine elements of form,” she said. “I design my painting. I try to be a designer, and I think about that while I’m trying to figure out how to paint it. I try to paint a study, and I try to get the feel of what it is I’m trying to tell the story about. All of my paintings are a story.”
Over the years, Mayer has learned many different mediums of painting, but she said her favorite still remains oil.
“That’s what I’ve learned in, but I’ve taken many classes in pastels, which is a soft chalk,” she said. “I paint with sticks of charcoal and do drawings. I also have taken classes in watercolor. The most unforgiving is watercolor, but the most forgiving is oil, so I like oil.”
Mayer said after the Sunset Center mall in Amarillo was redone, she and the other artists who had galleries there were paid a severance to leave from Crouch’s art foundation.
“I was paid about $3,000 at the time to leave my gallery in Amarillo and given money to go out and start my own gallery for the year,” Mayer said.
When Crouch passed away, she left her foundation $40 million, and Mayer and the other artists from the Sunset Center were paid quite well from that money.
“Ann helped us so much, and I learned so much in the business world of art when I was down in Amarillo,” she said.
Mayer is now back in the Oklahoma Panhandle in Hooker.
“The city manager told me about this building, the old Tri-County Electric Building, and he said ‘I think it would make you a really nice space,’” she said of the building where her gallery is now located. “I talked to the Oklahoma Economic Development Authority (OEDA) and made a deal to rent the space in 2018, and I brought all my stuff home from Amarillo and opened up my gallery. Ann Crouch helped me pay for my rent that first year.”
Mayer called art an avenue to relaxation.
“The fact my mother-in-law and I did it together was very special to me,” she said. “She really gave me the inspiration to continue to pain through the years. She encouraged me. I don’t know that would’ve done without Anna. The love of Anna and the love of art, doing it with my mother-in-law, we were art buddies. We did a lot of traveling. We went to art class every week together. We painted at home together.”
Mayer, who said she did not officially decide to become an artist until 2010, advised new artists to figure out the trade from the beginning, and a few years ago, she and her mother-in-law had their first two-woman art show at the No Man’s Land Historical Museum in Goodwell, Okla.
“We had about 30 paintings together, but that’s the year I decided I could probably paint,” she said. “I took a class from a guy who taught in Fowler. He taught me how to paint using shape.”
Mayer explained this concept by saying not to look at painting a cow, but rather to think of each painting as a piece of stained glass, and think of all of the colors and shapes that go into that.
“Do your blending later, but paint it like you’re painting pieces together to piece shapes together. I started painting like that, and that’s how I still paint,” she said. “I don’t paint a person. I look at shape, and I look at color. If I was going to tell a person who wants to start painting, start painting with the values of black and white with the gradations of gray in between.”
These are what Mayer calls value paintings.
“If you can get your values right, your darks and your lights and your mediums, if you can get all of that correct, that’s going to help you to be an artist because you just look for shape,” she said.
Mayer also teachers art at her Hooker studio.
“My students come at 10 o’clock in the morning on Thursday, and they come until noon,” she said. “They pay me $20, and I have free time that afternoon. They can stay and paint, or they can go home. We paint from 1 to 3, and I’ll help them. I also have open studio on Thursday afternoon.”
When her students leave at 3 p.m., Mayer said she continues to paint, sometimes as late as 7 p.m.
“I paint during the week,” she said. “On the average a month, I paint about six paintings. There’s some weeks that go by when I don’t even paint. I paint on my students’ work if they want me to. Whenever I’m working on a large painting like this and taking a class, I’ll paint anywhere from 12 to 20 paintings a month just doing value studies.”
Mayer said for her, art brings not only a sense of accomplishment, but also satisfaction.
“I have been able to put down a story, show the art of the emotion of what I’m painting,” she said. “When I did my airport art over here called ‘The Survivor,’ it was important to me for the people in the Amarillo airport who were traveling and rushing to get to their next location or wherever they were going, I wanted something to draw their attention as they were racing by trying to get where they were going. I wanted them to stop in mid-stride and go ‘Wow, look at that.’ I think I accomplished that.”
A lot of people saw the piece that hung in the Amarillo airport during the COVID-19 pandemic, and Mayer considers herself fortunate to have the painting hung there in fall 2019 just months before the start of the pandemic.
“It stayed at the Amarillo airport,” she said. “People thought it was a permanent exhibit. I brought it home. I thought it would sell. I’ve had several people wanting to buy it. I have charged by the square inch. I think it’s for sale for $31,000.”
Mayer said she still enjoys “The Survivor” painting, and she takes it to area art shows, including recently in Alva, Okla., and Dalhart, Texas.
“I’ve been able to show it to a lot of people,” she said. “A lot of people have seen it. I want people to enjoy my art. I don’t want them to be scared of it, but I want them to know there’s history. I wrote a bunch of history that goes with that painting about how the buffalo were close to extinction, and Charles Goodnight, along with some other people, decided they better start taking care of them.”
Conservation is important to Mayer, as are the buffalo, and this is just part of what she includes in her art.
“More than anything, art is important, and I can show all of that through my art,” she said.
