Emily and Cathy Dietrich with Robert Coombs, the first $10,000 Grand Prize winner in the RayMar contest

Cathy and John Dietrich started the company in 1998 for the very same reason artists now depend on the company’s quality products. When Cathy signed up for a painting workshop with Ted Goerschner at the Scottsdale Artists’ School, she received a supply list that included panels she would have to make on her own. “Why not just buy them,” she thought, but the prepared panels didn’t exist in the marketplace. Artists made their own by gluing canvas to boards that were often heavy, warped, or not archival. That gave the Dietrichs the idea of starting The RayMar company to make artists panels.

RayMar painting panels

Since then, the company based in Phoenix, Arizona has improved its panels; expanded the range of available surfaces to include linen, cotton duck, and polyflax/cotton blend primed with either acrylic gesso or oil priming. They have also increased the available standard and custom sizes, and the covered the reverse side of the panels with a gray melamine finish to prevent warping. But the most recognized RayMar products may be the gray panel carriers that everyone uses to hold their wet paintings when traveling or out in the field.

“Customers write to us with amusing stories about the durability of the panel carriers,” says Emily Dietrich who joined her mother in the business after John passed away in 2007. “One woman told us about the box protecting her panels even after a garbage truck rolled over it, and another artist mentioned that it saved his paintings after he accidentally dropped the panel carrier into the river in Venice, Italy,” Cathy recalls with a hardy laugh. “We have so many similar testimonials that we may put a page on our website called RayMar lore.”

RayMar Wet Painting Carriers

In 2005, RayMar sponsored its first annual fine art competition that is judged by top artists in the country (www.raymarartcontest.com).  Each month of the competition, an art professional selects and critiques 12 finalists paintings, including a monthly Best of Show from that month’s entries. These finalists are posted by the 15th of the following month and at the end of the 12 month of the competition, a final artist judge chooses the 12 award winners from the previously chosen and critiqued 144 monthly finalists. Last year, the company awarded $26,500 in cash prizes. “We’re very proud of the fact that the contest has brought well deserved recognition and cash prizes so many deserving artists,” says Cathy Dietrich.

RayMar also sponsors the John August Dietrich Memorial Award, named in honor of Cathy’s late husband and Emily’s father, in the annual Oil Painters of America competition. “We consider ourselves to be patrons of the arts,” say Cathy and Emily Dietrich. “Our mission is to provide the products that help artists create their best work and support venues where it can be showcased. That’s one of the reasons we’re happy to support the  PleinAir magazine convention and expo. Moreover, we really enjoy spending time with artists in galleries, studios, workshops, and conferences.”