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While serving in the Air Force, Eckmair was stationed in Korea, often traveling to Japan to hike, where he came across the art of wood cutting and became interested in it. Considered a master of the woodcut, Eckmair created haunting works evoking rural life in upstate New York. Most of his prints are a patchwork of items, houses, and landscapes from Gilbertsville, New York, where he grew up.
Eckmair’s distinctive regionalist woodcuts became widely known through his affiliation with Associated American Artists (AAA) of New York. AAA was a program founded to market affordable fine art prints to the American public. Like earlier artists such as Grant Wood, John Steuart Curry, and Thomas Hart Benton, Eckmair created prints of regional landscapes for AAA that had great populist appeal.
Eckmair’s woodcuts are unique for their use of white space, which was important to the artist. He purposely didn’t include people in his work, and called his pieces “lonesome places.”