Lessons from the life of an artist

The Nassau County community lost a world-renowned artist last week. William Robert Maurer Jr. passed away at the age of 85 after a life full of art and love. Maurer’s watercolors hang on walls from Morocco to New York to Paris to Nassau County. Maurer is perhaps best known locally for his 2007 art book, Sketches of Amelia Island and Fernandina Beach, and his murals in Baptist Medical Center Nassau and the Fernandina Beach branch of the Nassau County library. Maurer was a reader, a collector, a tinkerer, a nature lover and a man who saw the world differently than others because of his passion for passions.

“When I met Bill, he just opened my world,” said Kathleen Maurer, the artist’s wife of 18 years. “There was so much that I was missing.”

Maurer was classically trained as an architect and artist at Pratt Institute, the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and the École des Beaux-Arts. Family said that Maurer could look at a building and tell you what was original, what wasn’t, if a line wasn’t straight, if repairs needed to be done. He would look out at the present world and see what it must have looked like before he got there, how a tree wouldn’t have been as big as it is now and what it means to fence in a property that was not originally fenced in. That is one of the things about Maurer that his family wants to be carried forward, taking a closer look at the world around us and seeing things that other people don’t.

Maurer never let his high-society background betray his inner self. He was fast friends with a retired Appalachian coal miner, and Maurer’s family learned from friends of the artist that he always got served first at restaurants, probably owing to his ability to quickly form a meaningful relationship with the waitstaff. When he had his own architecture practice in Morocco, he helped his housekeeper immigrate to America. The same man who has murals in bohemian Paris cafes would happily let his granddaughter put his hair in curlers. Maurer found the balance between achieving serious endeavors while not taking himself too seriously, and lessons in how to strike that balance, are found in his artwork and his friendliness.

“There was something about him where everybody could fit in. It didn’t matter what you knew or who you were. He was a friend to everybody,” said a family member who wished to remain anonymous. Maurer would say that he loved Amelia Island, in part, because you could sit on a sidewalk downtown and “the whole world walks by” like he could in Paris or New York.

Maurer’s philosophy on life can be seen in his two local murals. In his mural at the Baptist Medical Center, from left to right, Maurer brings the open acres of tall and skinny trees in West Nassau right next to the thick and broad oaks that canopy over residential streets. Then there are the palms and their fronds that line the creeks and rivers that Maurer placed right next to the dunes and beach.

In his painting at the library, Maurer ties together the shared histories of Amelia Island to remind us that we are but one flag out of eight that has flown over this land. The scene is a palm tree-forested beach, there are ships from different eras in the same waters, a steam train blows by a shrimping boat. There may be different flags flying over the scene, but the mural shows the people of Amelia Island have been undertaking the same endeavors since the times of the Timucua people.

In those two murals, Maurer shows us in paint how he understood the world to be connected through, and by, people, place and time. Maurer unites the different identities and histories within Nassau County into one continuous, living being. His brush strokes are busy and active, the watercolors sometimes bleed into one another, he paints form clearly but not tightly, and there is always life in his work. Bringing history and people together means Maurer showed every moment in life as part of a story that has no real beginning and an end that’s impossibly far away. William Robert Maurer Jr. never let a moment go by without recognizing its beauty, and neither should anyone else.

SRosenthal@fbnewsleader.com