The Red Hydrant, 40"x60" Acrylic polymer on canvas.

"Occasionally when I drive these old roads, I come upon people indigenous to the area.  They look upon me, sometimes, as if I am trespassing. Of course, if they stop to see that I am making drawings, that all changes. On a recent trip to Lake Tahoe in early April this year, I stopped in Lone Pine for a couple hours to drive up and down the local roads that traverse the area west of Highway 395. Most of the hills above seven thousand feet had snow on them, though those facing to the west were barren.

“This location in particular, dotted here and there with the homes of those people I saw, had a character that reminded me of a place I lived in my youth. Grade school-age kids stopping to play along the road on their way home from school reminded me of old friends that I knew at a similar time in my life. I spent about an hour taking in that “good old feeling” that allowed me to reminisce similar experiences from when I was in elementary school. The Red Hydrant is the epitome of those rural places in which many of us once lived. They are still out there; we can still go see them."

Weidenhamer completed his first painting in 1949. Some of his early paintings were as large as 42 x 480 inches. His early works were landscape paintings of places in Ohio, Indiana and Arizona. Weidenhamer graduated Purdue University and attended The Art Institute, Chicago, and had several exhibitions of his combat art while in the United States Army. He painted in Cambodia, Laos, Egypt, Ethiopia, the Sudan, Afghanistan and other locales.

While the artist has painted portraits and figurative works, as well as combat art, he started painting his realistic highway landscapes, which have become the hallmark of his career, in 1967. More than a thousand of his creations have been “road paintings”.  John Weidenhamer has won more than one hundred first place awards and awards of merit in addition to civic purchase awards and other specialty awards from over five hundred public exhibitions of his work.

Weidenhamer keeps a 5,000 square foot studio in Indio, California where he paints his prodigious works of art.