If you’ve ever relied on one of those handy, folding ski maps to help you down a tricky run, you can thank James Niehues. He is the man behind the maps.
Niehues painted his first ski map in 1988 and since then, has created more than 350 different views for resorts, tourist bureaus, golf communities and outdoor sports related entities. His maps circle the globe.
Book of Ski Maps
He recently released a 292-page hardcover coffee table book – a stunning compilation of maps spanning his career. The ski tome appropriately titled “The Man Behind the Maps” has amassed hundreds of five star ratings.
His use of color has changed a bit through the years, but the detail is similar.
“I go back to some of my early ones (maps) and look at them and I am surprised at how good they were back in the early days,” he said. “I liked them then and I like them now.”
He’s painted Breckenridge, Jackson Hole, Whistler and practically everything in between. Are any iconic resorts missing from his portfolio? As a matter of fact, yes.
“One in particular. I’ve done every Vail resort that there is, I think, except for their namesake,” he said.
He painted Vail early in his career, but as computer imagery came onto the scene, Vail opted to go with a computer image rather than a hand-painted map.
“I don’t know why they still use an inferior product,” Niehues said.
No matter. Niehues retired in October from painting ski resort maps. But before we discuss his latest venture, let’s take a peek at the process behind his art.
Creating Aerial Art
His first step is to visit a place for about a week to do flyovers and take photos. Sometimes, the weather is clear; other times, it’s not.
“I can remember flying over southern Canadian area – Mont-Sainte-Anne. It was so cold that the windows would frost over. The heaters weren’t doing any good. I’d have to take out my credit card and scrape the frost off the window and shoot a photograph, then re-scrape it again for the next photograph,” he said. “And we were bouncing all over at the same time.”
Niehues takes most of the photos himself and has no idea how many photos he has on his computer.
In drawing ski resorts, he started out with a blank sheet of paper and sketched out the lift areas first, then went through his photographs to fill in each section. That took about a week. After receiving approval on the sketch from the resort, he transferred the sketch to the painting surface, then took two to four weeks to paint the whole map in watercolor.
He has sold prints for years, but just recently started selling a limited number of originals. In October, he sold a handful to help raise money for the Colorado Snowsports Museum in Vail. At the moment, he’s selling paintings to benefit the National Ability Center in Park City, Utah.
Great American Landscape Project
While ski resorts have been his bread and butter over the years, Niehues has taken a staggering number of photos of other beautiful landscapes, as well.
“I fly so many different areas for the ski resorts. Whenever I do fly over national parks or really interesting terrain, I’ll have the pilot drop down and get some shots,” he said. “I’ve always been wanting to get to them and have never been able to do it.”
At 76 years old, he realized that he simply can’t paint all of them. So he decided to stop at the sketch for his Great Landscape Project. So far, he’s sketched 26 of the 50 on his list.
He’s targeting many of the western national parks and other dynamic scenery in the United States like Niagara Falls, Devil’s Tower National Monument, the Cirque of the Towers and the Wind River Mountain Range.
“I’m doing them all in pencil,” Niehues said. “The black and white I really like. I like my sketches. It’s where the guts of the composition are created – where you put things together. It’s kind of exciting to me to show these in black and white.
It lets the viewer use their own imagination and put their own colors in.”
Why Change Direction?
Niehues has been painting scenery since he was a teenager.
“I look back and there wasn’t a whole lot of talent there at that time, but you just keep working at it and practicing and you get better and better,” he said.
Over the years, ski resorts have kept him so busy that he’s had precious little time to tackle other scenery. He said he’s just finally circling back to what he initially wanted to do 60 years ago.
One last question… Niehues has had a long, successful career. Why not retire for real and sit on a beach somewhere? Why launch a huge new project at 76 years old?
“It’s in my blood,” he said, laughing. “That’s just what I do. It’s a passion. I can’t turn it off.”
Website: https://jamesniehues.com/
Facebook: @jamesniehuesorsc
Instagram: @jamesniehues