Wendell Mohr

Wendell L. Mohr, a prolific Iowa artist whose award-winning watercolors of cityscapes and seaports, locomotives and manufacturing plants evoked a man-made world of color and action, died Sunday, May 25, in Des Moines. He was 82.
Mr. Mohr, who until recently lived in a Victorian schoolhouse near the Van Buren County village of Bentonsport, died of cancer.
A memorial service will be held at 10:00 a.m. Saturday, May 31, at First Christian Church, 2500 University Avenue. The family will receive friends 30 minutes before the service. A second memorial will be held later in Van Buren County. The body was donated to Des Moines University.
Mr. Mohr was a signature member of the American Watercolor Society (AWS) and the National Watercolor Society (NWS). He was a Transparent Watercolor Society of America Master Watercolorist and charter member of the Iowa Watercolor Society. His work appeared at shows around the country, including the AWS Annual Exhibition, the NWS Annual Exhibition, Transparent Watercolor Society Annual National Exhibition and many others.
His many awards include the NWS Artist’s Magazine Award, the NWS Arches Paper Award, and the AWS High Winds Medal. Mr. Mohr has exhibited at galleries and museums throughout the Midwest, including the Des Moines Art Center, Omaha’s Joslyn Art Museum and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. Moberg Gallery represents him in Des Moines. His work is in hundreds of private and corporate collections.
Rather than bucolic landscapes of rivers, mountains and meadows, Mr. Mohr typically captured the drama of colorful street scenes packed with pedestrians and ports bustling with ships, cargo and longshoremen. His impressionistic paintings captured the smoky muscularity of locomotives from railroading’s golden age and the massive machinery of mills and factories.
It all came from Mr. Mohr’s imagination. Although his sketches and prints documented nearly every local landmark in Iowa and the Midwest, few of his watercolors depicted actual settings. He couldn’t draw on the area around his isolated home and studio for the crowded streets and tall buildings he loved to paint. He never worked from photographs.
Instead, much of his work drew on his experience serving on five ships in the U.S. Merchant Marine during World War II, with voyages to South America, Europe, and East Asia. He also drew on his Army service during the Korean War, and on the rambling journeys and train trips he took as an inquisitive tourist.
His travels brought Mr. Mohr a long way from his Depression upbringing. He was born near Eldridge, Ia., on Feb. 25, 1926 to John and Martha Mohr. John Mohr died in a farm accident two years later, and Mr. Mohr was raised by his mother and her brothers. He graduated from high school in Davenport in 1943.
“I asked my mother for an art set or a drum set,” Mr. Mohr told the Des Moines Register in 1989. “She very wisely chose the art set. Art was the only thing I was ever very good at. Of course my teachers encouraged me, and that helped a lot. They urged me to go on to art school.”
Mr. Mohr earned an associate degree at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts in 1948 and later studied at the Des Moines Art Center. He worked for 20 years as a graphic designer and illustrator for art studios, advertising agencies and publishers, mostly in Des Moines.
Mr. Mohr married Elizabeth Wilson of Stuart in 1959. In 1970, he bet his family’s future on a full-time career as a watercolor painter, and the couple moved their two children from Des Moines to Bentonsport. The family converted the picturesque Vernon schoolhouse, built in 1868, into a home, studio, gallery and antiques shop. They were among a small group of pioneering businesspeople who brought the area new life as a tourist destination. Mr. Mohr quickly became active in the community, serving as an officer in the Keosauqua Lions Club and annually creating posters and programs for the Van Buren County Players theater group.
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