I would like to update my profile and send a much better jpeg photo of NYC At the Time of the American Revolution. Could you contact me about this? Thanks, Spelman Evans Downer. Curator's note; I have been doing many new world map paintings that are on my website... Here is a new write up;
M.A., Painting & Drawing, is a professional visual artist and art educator. He has a B. A. from Stanford and an M. A. from San Francisco State University. He has exhibited nationally from Alaska to New York City to California and internationally as well. Lives in the Mojave Desert in Yucca Valley, CA where he is director of Gallery Turquoise South. Has summer studio and gallery in Alaska at Cooper Landing on the banks of the Kenai River. Is director of Gallery Turquoise North at that location. From 2001 through Spring 2019 he was a tenured art instructor at Copper Mountain College in Joshua Tree, CA. His paintings investigate geographies, geologies, and histories using a map perspective.

William L. Fox, Director of the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, NV has written about Mr. Downer’s work; “Looking at Downer’s paintings allows you to see how he started making outline drawings of a landscape from photos he took, to tracing the contours of those photos from overhead projections that he then filled in with painting. It was a modern version of the process used by J.M.W. Turner but with contemporary tools. You can also see how his work evolved along a track that parallels how cartography itself developed. He first made drawing of maps from a vertical perspective and the paintings were relatively flat, then he brought in more impasto and he was creating actual physical shadows on the surface of the paintings. More recently, he produces relatively shiny surfaces when he pours enamels, but they are channeled between the oils, which again produces shadows. The effect pushes at you while it pulls in the eye the same time; the viewer becomes more actively engaged in looking. As in Turner’s career, the paintings slowly become more about the behavior of paint and light and human perception and less about the literal landscape—although his work never becomes untethered from the ground.”