Marti Weidert combines a love of nature with a commitment to teaching others about its offerings. These elements are reflected in her art, an avocation that has taken center stage in her life in recent years.
She was born in San Diego in a rural setting featuring goats, gardens, and a nearby creek. Her father’s U.S. Navy career produced many changes in where she lived growing up. When she resided in Washington, D.C., she received painting instruction at the Corcoran Gallery of Art when she was 10 years old. It ignited the spark that led to her lifelong interest in creating art. She also was a born teacher. On Guam, at the age of 18, she created a preschool for the children of naval officers. She had them do nature walks, study native flora, and draw what they saw.
After returning to San Diego and acquiring a law degree, she moved to Redding in 1991 and worked as a paralegal. She also taught art in various workshops sponsored by the City of Redding.
In 1998 Marti settled down with her new husband, biologist Carl Weidert, in the community of Inwood, near Shingletown. She has since been spending more time in the outdoors and memorializing local places, people, and themes in artistic renditions.
Weidert became one of the leading outdoor enthusiasts in the area, principally as an outings leader for the Shasta Group of the Sierra Club. She has led hikes, walks, snowshoeing outings, and overnight camping ventures. She tries to visit and study a location — its human history, geology, biology — ahead of the outing and then impart what she has learned to the participants.
She also ventures out to special settings, such as the Pacific Crest Trail, Lassen National Park, and various rustic destinations, among many others. She usually produces one or more artworks base on her discoveries — in addition to painting, her work includes drawing, mixed media, and photography. As for her approach to painting, she states: “I enjoy painting bright, loose images. I like to paint from unusual perspectives, like looking up at the subject or from an aerial perspective where I’m looking down on a landscape. There is a moment in every work where frustration presents a challenge, followed by resolution.”
In 2015, she was chosen as one of 10 artists by San Francisco’s De Young Museum curator for the Artist in Residence 2015 Program at the Whiskeytown National Recreation Area. Across nine days, she produced several works involving landscapes as well as people enjoying the water. Several of these works were purchased by the park and now hang there in the park headquarters and other locations.
In addition to Whiskeytown, her paintings can be viewed in Lassen National Park, the Shasta Land Trust office in Redding, the Bureau of Land Management office in Redding, and other facilities in Northern California Weidert occasionally writes articles on nature for Redding’s Record Searchlight. It was her article in January 2014 on the Ash Creek Wildlife Refuge off Highway 299 near Bieber that caused this writer and his wife to visit it and capture photos of hundreds upon hundreds of snow geese bursting from the water to splatter the blue sky with countless specks of white.
Besides her own efforts promoting nature, Marti’s husband, Carl, is one of the foremost environmental activists in Northern California. He co-founded the Bear Creek Watershed Group, which is dedicated to restoring salmon and steelhead runs in the creek. (Bear Creek flows from its headwaters above the town of Shingletown 35 miles to the Sacramento River. Throughout this long run, which is mostly in an inaccessible canyon, it holds an abundance of wild rainbow trout.)
The image shown here is of King’s Creek in Lassen National Park. In most years, it is replete with brook trout, offering the fly fisher an idyllic place to cast a fly.
