“A former photojournalist, my artistic practice explores physical and internal conflicts, the politics of conflict and current debates which rage around conflicts – wars, refugees, sacrifices… In contrast, as a result of the conflicts of war, recent Cumbrian paintings in the old tradition of landscape, while bold, bright and energetic, explore a relatively peaceful and cathartic environment. Such is my response to the landscape where I live and work now.” Kevin Weaver.
For several years during the 1990s, Kevin Weaver worked as a freelance journalist for UK broadsheets, magazines and BBC Radio. He covered conflicts and revolutions in Europe – East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania; and wars in Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo and Rwanda. More information here: Photojournalism.
As a teenager, Kevin Weaver InterRailed through, what is now, the former Yugoslavia. While freelancing for the Guardian newspaper during the Bosnian war, reflecting on his wonderful InterRail experience, and perhaps because Yugoslavia was so close to home, he became terribly distressed by what he witnessed. Nonetheless, despite being the first journalist to be medevacked by the UN out of Sarajevo, after being shot in the leg alongside a colleague who subsequently lost his leg, he felt compelled to returned to Bosnia. Kevin Weaver covered the war until it ended in 1995. After marrying a Bosnian nurse, he remained in Bosnia and covered the fallout from the war: the exhumation of mass graves, the DNA identification project for missing persons (ICMP) and the War Crimes trials in The Hague.
From 2000 onward, still reeling from his experiences and diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Kevin Weaver began to write, make sculptures and paintings in oil. The resulting body of work is a cathartic exercise, but it was after seeing photojournalist Tim Hetherington’s (1970-2011) exhibition [1] at Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool that he began to seriously consider a courageous retrospective of his own work to bring the plight of many to our attention – 2015 will be the 20th anniversary of the Bosnian war and the longest siege, Sarajevo, in history.
Now based in Cumbria, on the fringe of the Western Lake District, Kevin Weaver responds to the local landscape with bold, bright and energetic paintings in oil.