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From his earliest days in Denmark, Olaf Wieghorst, the American West, the horse, and art seemed bound to a single destiny. A strong, strapping young man, Wieghorst trained to be an acrobat. In 1918 this led to work with an American film crew on a Western filmed in Denmark. When the film crew returned to America, Wieghorst joined along. Once in New York he immediately enlisted in the U.S. Cavalry, as they were about to be posted to the Southwest in pursuit of Pancho Villa, who had crossed into New Mexico. For the next four years, Wieghorst explored the southwestern landscape that would shape his aesthetic. He then worked as a cowboy and ranch hand and eventually found himself back in New York City, serving as a mounted police officer. There, in the late 1930’s, Wieghorst met sculptor Joe Paulio, who was creating a model of a horse in the police stables. Paulio inspired Wieghorst to begin painting, sculpting, and printmaking, and in 1944 he moved west and settled in El Cajon, California.

In art as in life, Wieghorst “stayed” on horses. He once observed, “I couldn’t have learned what I did from some teacher in art school, I learned about horses by sleeping, freezing, thirsting, and starving with them. I learned by doing; I paint what I know.” Broadly speaking, Wieghorst was a realistic painter, but there is always something of the fable in his work, a sense of romance that aligns him with his Danish countryman, writer Hans Christian Andersen. In Mountain Ponies, the three subjects - all different from one another - confer in the artist’s characteristic high-altitude haze in shades of blue. The place itself is a sanctuary, a haven for the equine wildness Wieghorst loved and loved to paint.

- James D. Balestrieri