“This year I’ve been bludging,” he says with his customary dose of dry humour. “I had a pacemaker replacement in Newcastle this year over a day and a bit. I’m a bloody robot.”

Watters had a show at Watters Gallery in Sydney (part-owned by his brother Frank) in March, selling 10 of the 15 works on show, almost all new paintings. At age 79, the quality is still there, and the prices start near the $4000 mark.

“He’s as spritely as ever, as agile as ever,” says Joe Eisenberg, retired director of Maitland Regional Art Gallery, about Watters. “I suspect he will stop when he can no longer paint.”

Freelance arts consultant Bruce Tindale is writing a biography of Watters for a book planned by Muswellbrook council. He shares a similar observation about Watters’ ability: “If anything, he’s getting crisper and crisper in the methodology he uses, the technique.”

Watters, the second of seven children born to Frank and Iris Watters in 1936 in Muswellbrook, has been painting for 58 years. Although his parents are deceased, Watters still lives in the family home, and paints there, as he always has.

The self-taught painter’s works are held in many private collections as well as the National Gallery of Australia and Art Gallery of NSW. He established his subject matter early, specialising in buildings and environment of the Hunter Region, and has focused on such settings most of his career.

“I never did school art,” Watters says. “You know what put me off art, back in those days. It was about red white and blue. ‘Blue and green should never be seen’. ‘Black’s not a colour’. I thought, ‘you got no right telling people they can and cannot use. That’s when I decided, bugger this, I wasn’t going to back to art.”

But he did do technical drawing, and that certainly came in handy later.

Watters did a butcher’s apprenticeship at meatworks in Aberdeen, did a spell of national service and ended up working in St Heliers underground coal mine leading a team of pit ponies. He later worked for the electricity commission for 28 years at McCullys Gap and Liddell power stations.

The Upper Hunter has a rich history in the arts. The Muswellbrook Art Prize began in 1958 and continues to this day, with a $40,000 biennal prize for painting, plus awards for drawings and ceramics. In 1964 Fred Williams won the prize, with Max Watters winning the associated local art prize with his oil work, Old Shed Happy Valley.

Watters calls winning the 1964 local art prize “the best thing that ever happened”.

Watters sought out Daniel Thomas, an esteemed art historian, for advice on his career path in art after the show. “I said ‘I’ll go and learn how to paint. And he said, ‘no you don’t. You just paint, the more you paint, the more you learn”.

Watters was encouraged in his art by his older brother Frank, who moved to Sydney and eventually opened a gallery with Geoffrey Legge that has been a leading outlet for new Australian art for more than 50 years.

“Frank took me out into the country to get used to the feeling of the environment,” Watters says. “There wasn’t a house in sight so I did a heap of crap. I came home and someone kept saying ‘where’s the river? you don’t put a river in’. I’d say, ‘the river’s there, look behind you. It took me out there to get the feeling of the environment. I’d get sketches or photographs and decide whether I wanted to do it.”

His working method evolved. At first he went on location with a photographer, with Watters drawing and the photographer taking images of the landscape. Later, the photographer would bring the images to Watters. “I set them out in my way,” Watters says. “I draw it out first, to see how it looks, if it’s in balance and it I’m happy with it. In my early work, it’s just flat areas drafted out and coloured in, accidently things happen. And I’d look at it and say, ‘hang on a minute, I can do something with that’ ”.

With experience, Watters’ develops his own, special work. 

“I like the building,” he says. “It’s got its character. It represents the people who built it. A building is an alien figure in the environment. In years to come the environment takes over.”

“The style becomes refined,” Tindale explains. “He starts to develop his own way of seeing things. He cherry picks, like all artists do. Max takes the building over there, the hills over here, the trees over there. He pulls them all together for the fabulous work.

“This is what artists do: they interpret, they put things together.”

Eisenberg held exhibits of Watters’ work at Maitland gallery, and owns some of his work, says "nobody else will leave such a legacy of what it it looks like” in the Muswellbrook area. Watters’ unique style, at times called ‘naive,’ a reference both to lack of formal art education and to a stylistic sense, has become his trademark.

“You can see colour, lines, form – because of that the paintings are very agreeable to people and will serve as a wonderful record in a very painterly way,” Eisenberg says.

“If you like Max’s work, you would like 90 per cent of what he paints and what he draws,” Eisenberg says. “Because his style is so unique and distinct.

“And he colours the frames and edges, so he blends imagery in with the frames, so you get a bundle ready to put on the wall. His style has been superlative, no change or development. He’s been a master all the way through.”

Working in his home, as he always has, Watters may have four different pieces in development at the same time, using different rooms in the house to dry them.

“And he colours the frames and edges, so he blends imagery in with the frames, so you get a bundle ready to put on the wall. His style has been superlative, no change or development. He’s been a master all the way through.”

Working in his home, Watters may have four different pieces in development at the same time, using different rooms in the house to dry them. He sets a target of 10 to 15 pieces every 18 months, and delivers like clockwork (depending on the weather, needing warm summers to dry the various layers of paint), usually showing at his brother’s Sydney gallery.

Watters rents a bus for the trip to Sydney for the opening of his shows. “I take a group of people who want to go,” he says. “I can afford it. That’s what it’s about it. It opens the door for a lot of other people.”

Tindale stops short of calling Watters iconic when questioned, but he acknowledges that Watters’ work will be remembered for a long time.

“He’s an important one. A very good painter,” Tindale says. “He has something that represents regionalism, which Australia doesn’t get many of those. He represents something that belongs to the Upper Hunter.”

The Muswellbrook Regional Art Centre owns 12 works by Max Watters, six from its collection and six that are included in the Max Watters Art Collection that the artist gifted to the shire.

Watters’ legacy will not rest solely on those artworks or his own reputation. Rather, there are two other vital aspects of his relationship to the shire that will long be remembered.

For more than 50 years Watters has offered art classes locally, starting on Saturday mornings  in Denman long ago.

Watters tells the story: “A friend of mine invited me to go out to Denman to paint in the street. We had butcher’s paper. What was going to happen when someone came long with kids, for two bob they’d have a sheet of butcher’s paper and paint on it. What was happening, if they had more than one child they would generally decided which one had talent and pay for them. I said ‘no more’. I’d pay the money toward the cost and we’d give all the kids a bit of paper. How do you know unless you give them a go.”

To this day, Watters still offers art classes; one morning at Strathearn Aged Care village in Scone, one afternoon at Muswellbrook PCYC, and, when it warms up, at Wybong Community Hall.

“I”m not an art teacher. I couldn’t be an art teacher,” he says. “I encourage art – creativity.”

The final gift of Watters’ legacy to Muswellbrook is his donation, known as the Max Watters Art Collection, of 300 works of art from his personal collection. Given to the shire in 2004 after hard-nosed negotiations to guarantee the works would be given a good home (the refurbished School of Arts on Muswellbrook’s main thoroughfare is an excellent gallery), it’s valued at least $2million and features works from many of Australia’s greatest contemporary artists including Robert Dickerson, Richard Larter, Euan McLeod, Tony Tuckson, John Perceval, Grace Cossington-Smith, Charles Blackman, Imants Tiller, Danila Vassilieff and Jon Plapp.

The works show on regular rotation in their own room in the shire’s gallery.

Watters began collecting in 1958, buying many works from his brother Frank’s Sydney gallery.

Watters dedicated the collection to the memory of his parents, Frank and Iris. In his usual honest assessment, he says the collection honours his parents because they never objected to all the work he brought home to store at the family home. “The poor buggers couldn’t understand it, but they let me do it,” he says.

Eisenberg says of the Watters collection: “It’s really a who’s who of contemporary art over the last 50 years. Muswellbrook is very fortunate to have that possession.”

Watters continues to buy contemporary art and add it to the collection. He has faith in the present and future value of art in the region. After mining is finish, Watters believes arts and culture will hold the key to the region’s success.

“I still believe this area will be a major cultural centre,” he says. “There’s that many people working in it, doing things.”

Tindale has worked at several regional galleries in Australia. He knows that you don’t come across a Max Watters very often.

“He is quite unusual. There’s lot of individuals who donate a work here and there. He’s a different kettle of fish. He’s a bloke who time has lost.”

“He’s in his element. He’s always given to the community since he was quite young.”

Watters is making history before the paint even dries.