Diann Haist of Anchorage says her husband first met Eric Deeter in a local gallery where they both exhibited art, and he insisted that she and Eric would hit it off.

He was right.

Very soon after meeting, the two began painting together and were at her house painting the day before he died. In a split second, Deeter’s death, which occurred during rush hour traffic in September, left her world with a huge emptiness. When she speaks of Eric and their time together as friends and artists, Haist refers to both Eric and his wife, Gretchen, as family.

Diann says, “Gretchen was exceptionally supportive of Eric’s art, able to advise from an exterior view on his career paths, as she has the ability to judge people’s character easily, which is valuable to an artist in dealing with the gallery venues. They trusted each others judgments and from my observations, in knowing them both, acted as one most of the time. It was beautiful to see.”

There is lots of history between them. She elaborates by saying, “Eric Deeter and I had a weekly ‘paint date,’ sometimes a couple of times a week, depending on whether there was a show to be worked for or not. Frequently we painted en plein air somewhere, even when it was cold and rainy. Once we painted outside when it was -10 degrees.

“It was usual to begin our day no later than 9 a.m., sometimes earlier, and work until well after midnight. Conversations were diverse and lively — mostly about music as we both shared a passion for its various forms, and of course, art in general. Politics, renewable energy, the state of the world, all received our attention in hours of discussion as our brushes were flying.

“When the conversations turned to personal subjects, Eric never missed a beat to tell me how proud he was of his beautiful wife Gretchen and their son Jeff’s accomplishments, and (how) truly accomplished they both are. Gretchen is not only a published memorable poet, as well as being a teacher, but she is a baker, and Eric would spoil us by showing up with cheesecake and carrot cakes, and some of the best quiche I have ever had the pleasure of eating.

“When Eric first came to work with me, he was relatively new at painting in oils, his expertise having begun with watercolor, then acrylics. He at first told me that he really didn’t like using oil paints, but soon developed a love for the medium and thought he might not go back to acrylics, although he still enjoyed working in watercolors.

“Eric had an early habit of squeezing tiny amounts of paint on his palette and painting thinly. He would tease me that I ‘wasted’ more paint than he put into 10 paintings. I told him he should start giving people their money’s worth and get some paint on the dang canvas — paint like a millionaire!  After a couple of months, he called one day to tell me how proud I would be of him — his paint was thick! He said that he actually found it much easier to paint with more on the brush. He kept that up.”

Teresa Roy shares how she and Eric met when renting from the same landlord and occupying the same space. It was an older office building in downtown Palmer. She had an interior design company, still does, and he had a painting studio, and their taste in music was from one extreme to the other. They agreed to divide the space with a huge divider, and to only play certain music when the other person was around.

She recalls arriving one early morning to hear this very loud Latin music coming from Eric’s side of the downstairs and there was also an unusual periodic thump, thump, thump, that really had her curious. She peeked down the steep staircase unobtrusively to see Eric on the Nordic track drinking a beer.

She said, “He knew that exercise was good for him, but (it had to be) on his own terms.”      

As time went by, the divider never got built and they devised their sensible “play list.”

Soon after Teresa moved her business to Alaska Street, she contacted Eric to move over too, since there was plenty of room. In the new work space, they ended up spending a lot of time chatting and encouraging each other in their somewhat unrelated fields. He would tell her to quit fussing over a decorative window treatment that he thought looked great. “Leave it alone. Stop messing with it,” he would say, while swiveling on the small chair with casters next to her cutting table.

“Once a week, I had to go down and collect scissors. He used the good fabric scissors.” She expounded on how fabric scissors are precious, “but you just couldn’t get mad at the guy.”

While sharing the basement space, Eric worried about floods.

“He was the ‘worst-case-scenario’ kind of guy,” she kidded and called him Chicken Little. “He would always say to put things on pallets because ‘the thing about basements is they always flood.’ I heard this for three years, but I quit putting things up (on palettes).

“Then when the rains came in November last year, my things got soaking wet and his were all put up. He spent overnight with a pump to clear the space (of water) and meet with the landlord. He expected the worst and when disaster came, he was ready.

He never said, ‘I told you so.’ He said ‘you probably needed to get rid of some of this stuff anyway,’ meaning the soggy fabric.”

Both Diann and Teresa talk of how different it is without Eric.

“I keep expecting him to walk through the door,” Diann said, and Teresa speaks of the pickup he drove a lot, and how many times she said, “Oh, Eric’s here. It was always good to see him.” It is “immeasurable” how much he will be missed, she said.

Suzanne Bach is a Valley artist and teaches at Mat-Su College.