Weaver is an ex war correspondent who covered several conflicts during the 1990’s beginning with the series of revolutions across eastern Europe including the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Romanian revolution, the Velvet revolution in Czechoslovakia and the Croatian and Bosnian wars in the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia. He also covered the genocide in Rwanda and Hutu exodus to Zaire and finally the NATO conflict with Serbia over Kosovo. He worked as a photographer and journalist freelancing for The Independent , The Guardian, The New Statesmen, and BBC radio among many others.
He is now an artist living and working on the west coast of Cumbria in Ennerdale, after being diagnosed with PTSD – due in part to his being shot in Sarajevo in 1992 while covering the war in Bosnia. He uses his nightmares and photographs as starting points for his large oil, wax and silicon paintings and light installations of objects such as Yugoslav money, scorpions, moles and crabs embedded in epoxy resin with lights behind. The show at Florence features several new war paintings including, ‘The Silence of Trees, Bosnia’, which depicts the haunting suicide hanging of a Bosnian Muslim mother-of-two who had just been ethnically cleansed and her husband had been one of 8,000 Muslim men and boys massacred in the fall of Srebrenica.
He also paints impressionistic landscapes of the Lake District and other spots around the UK including Dumfries & Galloway, Norfolk and Cornwall. The Florence show will feature new works of local west Cumbrian villages including Trumpet Terrace in Cleator Moor, Pica’s distinctive row of terraces overlooking The Solway, Maryport harbour scenes, Allonby, Cockermouth , Whitehaven and Frizington.
There will also be oil on glass paintings the Weaver has been working on during the last year – a technique he has pioneered himself painting on the reverse of 6-8mm thick glass and scratching into it using a screwdriver. The glass is then raised on white board on standoffs.
