Wade Meyers has loved flying for as long as he can remember—and perhaps, even longer. Meyers’s enthusiasm for flight only increased with age, and he began taking flying lessons in high school. At age 18, Meyers joined the volunteer staff of the Eighth Air Force Museum at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. His work with this museum, which spanned almost two decades, provided Meyers with a close-up view of the military aircraft he would later capture on canvas. After high school, he earned a B.A. in History from Louisiana State University in Shreveport and later attended Louisiana Tech University for a year and a half while earning his Commercial Pilot Certificate and Instrument Rating.

In his mid-thirties, Meyers decided to get serious about his art. He began with a line of prints done in pencil but later shifted his emphasis to color using acrylics and eventually oils. In 1997, he made a life-altering decision: he joined the American Society of Aviation Artists (ASAA), an organization devoted to upholding artistic quality and authenticity in aviation art and focused on the education of aviation artists.

“Whatever I have achieved,” says Meyers, “I owe it to the ASAA.” While Meyers admits he has a gift, he is adamant that talent without hard work and expert training will always render inferior work. It was in pursuit of that expert training that Meyers decided to attend his first ASAA forum in 1999. These annual forums provide an opportunity for both beginners and accomplished artists to exhibit their work and receive critiques from some of the best known aviation artists in the industry.

“I received a lot of really good, bone-jarring critiques that first forum. But I got a late start in aviation art, and I needed to make up for lost time. So I went in there with the attitude of ‘Go ahead and hammer me. Just tell me what I’m doing wrong.’ As a result, I learned more in that one-week forum than I probably would have learned in four years of art school.”

Meyers continued to attend forums, striving to hone and refine his craft. He studied with world-famous aviation artist Keith Ferris and completed hours of self study using books on composition and color theory. As the weeks turned into months and then years, he continued to paint and make mistakes.

By 2003, Meyers quit his job at The Southern Museum of Flight in Birmingham and began to work fulltime as an aviation artist. Though working as an aviation artist was a milestone for Meyers, it was by no means the crest of the hill. Painting is hard work, and there is a great deal of research and preparation that goes into each piece. In fact, Meyers says 40 percent of his “sweat equity” goes into researching his subject. “I’m trying to depict a story, capture a moment in history, and it’s important to get the details right. If I’m painting the 4th Fighter Group in an action that happened on April 8, 1944, I have to know what the Fourth was flying, what type of airplane, what stage their markings were in. I also need to know how many victories the pilot had, how many crosses to put on the side of the airplane, and what the paint job looked like in that time period.

Once the research is completed, Meyers still has a long way to go before the first brush stroke ever touches the canvas. Since the scenes depicted in his paintings exist only in Meyers’s imagination, he uses a practice called descriptive geometry to ensure the accuracy of each line. Descriptive geometry is a technical drawing technique that allows the artist to view an airplane at any angle. Meyers is one of a handful of artists to apply it to aviation art.

Through trial and error and with help from Keith Ferris and ASAA, Meyers has refined and mastered this very technical aspect of the creative process. He has even penned Perspective Projection by Descriptive Geometry: A Manual for the Artist, a user-friendly manual that includes 72 hand-drawn illustrations of each concept discussed. To demonstrate how it works, Meyers provides several in-progress shots on his Web site, showing how the painting develops, from the rough sketch to the final painting through this descriptive geometry process.

Meyers’s Web site also displays a collection of his artwork. “Wade is a consummate artist who prepares himself to produce the best possible work he can for that which he creates,” says art educator, ASAA Executive Secretary and ASAA Artist Member Don Malko. “His drawing skills are superb. His compositions are very well planned. His knowledge of descriptive geometry enables him to work independent of the camera eye to produce original compositions using this complex method of perspective. His preparation for value and color in his paintings is academically sound and illuminates the surface of his canvases."

Browsing through the gallery of Meyers’s paintings, what becomes evident to even the most untrained eye, is that this is the work of not only a gifted artist and dedicated professional, but a military enthusiast whose lifelong passion for flying and unwavering demand for accuracy provides each viewer with a breathtaking glimpse into history from the best seat in the house.

In 2009 Wade was elected an Artist Fellow in the American Society of Aviation Artists.