My art explores that place where light and colour meet and create an emotional response in the viewer.  In my early years as an artist, I was drawn to those painters who incorporated light into their work … whether it was the Impressionist painter Alfred Sisley or the American abstract painter Richard Diebenkorn who explored the atmospheric light of the Santa Monica area in California in his exquisite Ocean Park Series.  Over time, my work has evolved to where I am using larger masses of color on the painting surface.  This allows me to better explore the emotional response that color and light evoke in the human spirit.

Collage has an ongoing role in my explorations into color and light and allows me to simplify complex designs down their basic forms. The collages of a decade ago were fully realized little works but the collage process now is more open-ended and purely a means of distilling the complex down to the essential.

My perspective on what I want to convey on the painting surface has changed dramatically over the last decade. The narrative element has fallen away and my process now is more about evoking the sensuality of the visual experience. This has meant that painting now is in a realm where abstraction, colour, and light merge into one.

Don Weir