About john B. Winterbottom

John’s passion for art, design and architecture started at a young age, inspired by both his father and grandfather.  John’s  father painted water color landscapes and modern acrylic paintings while working as a leading  industrial designer responsible for designing  products including bathroom fixtures, interiors for jet airliners, tractors and the first answering machine.  John’s grandfather was a renowned engineer and bridge designer responsible for designing bridges for rivers in Pittsburgh and working on the Panama canal design.

As a 1978 graduate from Pratt Institute, with a Bachelors of Fine Arts, John focused on environmental design and architecture working on designs for many community and environment planning ventures.  His first real job was in commercial architecture and interior design for NYC fashion house showrooms for designers including Ralph Lauren, Bill Blass and Oscar de la Renta. The work entailed first sketching the concepts, presentations to clients and then drafting the plans to create the working construction drawings.  His success grew into architectural and interior designing and planning for larger corporations, showrooms, restaurants, stores and eventually banks.  Working with a large national bank, John became their expert in mergers and acquisitions, devising strategic plans to maximize the acquired real estate of the financial institutions. While this work was far from John’s love and passion he continued his pursuit of art, sketching and painting in acrylics, on weekends.
 
In 2010 John drew the line with the commercial world and returned to art full-time when he enrolled in oil painting lessons.  
From then on John pursued his love of art through painting oil landscapes and interiors with a particular focus on capturing the light, taking off from his earlier work with architectural drawings and sketching.  

I want the observer of my paintings to “feel the light” within my paintings.

​Today John works out of his studio in Solebury, Bucks County, Pennsylvania which is next to the Bucks County style home that he and his wife renovated in 2000. This home is also part of John’s inspiration as it was designed and built by an early 1900s New Hope School impressionist painter, Richard A. Wedderspoon, a close associate of other New Hope artists including Daniel Garber.  
​These early Pennsylvania impressionist artists were inspired by the rich Delaware River valley color and light just as John is today.  John is inspired by these local painters to include Edward Redfield in addition to Garber, and Wedderspoon, as well as European impressionist masters such as Vincent VanGogh, which you may see in John’s brush stroke and use of color and light.

While extensive time and resources go into the creation of the work presented here in his Bucks county studio, John is seasonally on the road with easel, oil paints and brushes and his dog, Keira up and down the east coast to his two other favorite regions to capture the light and landscapes in St. Augustine, Florida and Mount Desert Island, Maine.