Heuer grew up in Lander, Wyoming amidst the incredible beauty of our country's purple mountain majesty. He remembers countless afternoons watching the clouds drift by and and in the evenings hearing his father call him to see another sunset. He also grew up in a world fantastic, the worlds of Edgar Rice Borroughs, Asimov and Frank L. Baum. These were the images of his youth, a world of massive distant mountains, flaming sunsets, exploding nebula, frozen moons and cities of fantastic shifting shadow and light. Images he longed to share.

But, these were not the images to confront Heuer when as a young man he explored the museums and galleries of our great cities. Accepted contemporary art did not reflect anything he wanted to share. He preferred the great visionaries of the late 19th Century, the romantics, Albert Bierstadt, Frederick Church, even Maxfield Parish who until recently was overlooked by the art world. What a shock to discover colleges do not teach the skill necessary to bring his visual longings to fruition.

He struck out on his own determined to glean what he could studying the old masters and digesting the great treatises on materials and techniques, but mostly he spent hours upon hours figuring out his own approach to painting. Oils seemed the perfect medium as it can be worked and re-worked. It seemed he spent as much time taking paint off the canvas as putting it on.

"Although, maturity has not changed my desire to capture the images of my youth, it has however, honed my approach. I have learned that the world offers far more ideas than I can conjure. But copying the world has never been my goal, rather I try to see its colors, patterns and shapes and combine them into a cohesive whole, a design I find pleasing and interesting. For reference, I use nature any way I can. I stand in it, photograph it, memorize it, recollect it, sketch it and even dream it. Thus, for me nature is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Nature is about ideas.

"And in the end, I have come to realize 20th Century abstract art does reflect something I wish to incorporate into my painting. Is not our world but an abstract amalgamation of interacting parts, of undulating interconnected landscapes and light? Is not our response to nature but a reflection of our desire to control chaos, to make sense of its infinite abstracted images? Are not clouds just interesting shapes that when pulled out of context could be just another 20th Century abstract painting. As an artist I wish to communicate, to de-mystify, to clarify, share and realize in paint the controlled colored chaotic abstraction of reality. I would rather create an interesting shape or color to express an idea rather than paint a specific object or detail. Contemporary art and especially abstract art helps me express my personal experience, both externally and internally, remembrances of things past, of places I've been and am, of mountains, cities, and great trees.

" Amongst the tools need to create these abstracted worlds include forays into realty, into plein air, into the New Mexico landscape, the Wyoming landscape, even the New York City landscape of photographs past. More recently I have begun to use the computer to manipulate and form images before I begin to paint. And I never wanted to limit myself, to be just a regional painter. I strives to paint a Heuer not just another mountain. I try to realize in paint the controlled colored chaotic beautiful abstraction of both ours and world's imagined."

In fact, when not painting the landscape around him, Heuer likes to create visionary paintings which combine multiple geographic locations into one painting, a sort of "hyper-reality" he coined as "Utopic Displacement". "Utopia literally means nowhere, but these paintings contain multiple somewheres, thus they are both real and imagined, they are utopias displaced, they are Landscapes of the West & Beyond."

Admired by his public and critics alike, Heuer has truly stepped beyond landscapes of the West into the beyond with international recognition and sales. His large paintings are keenly sought by collectors far and wide. And he continues to travel the world, camera in hand gathering material for his next big painting.