War & Peace

About

Kevin Weaver was born in Scotland but moved to England aged ten. On completing a BA hons in the Arts he worked as a photojournalist covering conflicts across the world in the 90’s including the Romanian revolution, the war in Bosnia (he was shot and wounded in Sarajevo), the Rwandan genocide and the Kosovo conflict for The Independent and several other newspapers and magazines. He became a teacher in 1999 teaching Media, English and Drama for eleven years in London. During this time he began making art and sculptures. He left teaching in 2013 and began working as a full time artist shortly after to moving to Frizington, West Cumbria.

In 2005-6 Kevin had been diagnosed with PTSD from his war experiences. He began making paintings and sculptures based on his feelings and nightmares about his traumatic experiences. He chose to embed animals and objects in plastic resin to preserve them and allow him to build up layers and shine lights from behind to add to these layers. These sculptures were boxed in metal and bracketed to the wall. He also began some oil paintings based on his experience covering wars.

When he moved to Cumbria in 2010 he began to expand into larger forms of sculpture, landscape and war themed oil painting that has developed since to include the themes of energy bio-diversity, nature and man’s effect on the landscape as well as war and man’s inhumanity to man. Kevin paints using very impressionistic colours using contrasts and draw on a variety of influences including The Impressionists, Fauvism, Cubism, art deco and contemporary art.

Kevin's war paintings are figure based and he uses wax and silicon to add texture and depth to his figures usually placed in a war-torn or forested landscape. Forests represent both a safe retreat from the urban jungle and a scary mythical place of dark threats.