Aviation Artist Rick Herter

Considered one of the foremost aviation artists working today, Rick Herter’s dynamic paintings capture the passion, history and iconic aircraft of the past, present and future.

Rick was born on a rural farm near Dowagiac, Michigan. Like many youngsters, he spent countless hours staring up at the sky and dreaming of flight. The Herter farm was on the training track for local student pilots and Rick watched Piper Cubs and Cessnas flying lazily over the fields where he worked. His first flight experience was on his 13th birthday. The local airport manager had been a WWII B-24 pilot in a Cessna Aerobat. After that first airplane ride, Rick was bitten by all things aviation related.

During his high school years Rick would fly with local pilots, hang around the small county airport and learn as much as he could about military aviation and aviation history.

In 1980, Herter left Dowagiac to attend college where he eventually earned a BA in Art in 1984. Fortuitously, during the ‘80s, the new genre of aviation art burst onto the scene and had a meteoric rise in popularity as a new collectable form of fine art. During this same time, Herter relocated to Kalamazoo, Michigan and began working as a commercial artist in the advertising field. It was almost by accident that while working as a commercial artist, Rick was commissioned to create the souvenir poster art for one of the largest airshows in the country.

That first attempt at aviation art went on to win the 1987 International Council of Air Shows (ICAS) Poster of the Year award and as a result, kicked off Herter’s aviation art career. The following year the artist was commissioned to create works for major air shows around the United States. Over the next few years his work became more recognized and with increasing demand from aviation-related clients like aerospace companies and private collectors, Rick resigned from his job in advertising to join the aerospace world as a full time aviation artist.

The Air Force comes calling.

Around the same time, Rick’s work was also being followed by the prestigious United States Air Force Art Program. The USAFAP was under the command of the Secretary of the Air Force Office of History and was created in the 1950s. The program was a cooperative between the Air Force and a select group of professional civilian artists who volunteered their skills to capture the history of the Air Force mission, airmen and equipment through visual art. The art created by these artists was then used to help tell the Air Force story to the American public. Although the artists weren’t paid — and their time and original artworks, created from their experiences, were donated to the Air Force — the service gave artists access to Air Force events and experiences that were normally not available to civilians. Herter was invited into the program and offered the rare opportunity to be one of few, flight-qualified artists. The opportunity to fill that role included the successful completion of various Air Force training requirements to achieve the qualification.

From the late 1980s through 2022 Rick was invited to fly and capture the history of Air Force units worldwide. He deployed with Air Force units to the four corners of the globe both during peacetime and combat operations. Over the years the artist flew in nearly every aircraft in the USAF inventory; his final flight was an hour-long ACM training mission in the F-16 … the fourth Viper mission of his long career.
Rick has also served United States Space Command, Space Operations Command and Space Systems Command, as well as the United States Navy and the Navy Fighter Weapons School, TOPGUN.
Herter’s military work also hangs in the collections of foreign nation militaries such as: Israel, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Greece, Taiwan, The United Kingdom, Netherlands, Singapore, UAE and several others.

World Record:

Rick’s many years of service capturing the history of the United States Armed Forces, only tells part of the story. Herter’s largest and most accomplished painting is in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Commissioned in 2003 and finished in 2004, his Guinness World Record-sized mural, “The Century of Flight” is located at the Kalamazoo Air Zoo Aerospace and Space Museum and measures an astounding 26,000 square feet of hand-painted mural.

When not in the sky, Herter can be found painting in his Jupiter, Florida studio. His commission schedule is often booked a year in advance and he continues to regularly paint for major companies like Airbus, Boeing, Rolls-Royce and many others. He still is very active within the military and has major upcoming works for specific units, capturing recent military operations like Operation Midnight Hammer.
When not painting, he can be found with his wife Lorea, Rottweiler Nala and their greatest artistic creations, a blended family of nine children and eight grandchildren.