Press and Editorial

MICHAEL WESTON

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MICHAEL WESTON'S fifth solo exhibition at Annandale Galleries features an installation of his famous heads with some large landscapes. The show is subtly different to anything from the past asthere is a mystery to these works that puts them more on the edge than is usual. A myriad of expressions and emotions stream from the faces and may change rapidly for the viewer according to mood. Some of the portraits and landscapes are almost expressionist in their nature and execution, sometimes dark and monochromatic and yet somehow serene when viewed intently. Weston?s work evokes for me the adage by Matisse that a successful artwork should be ?like a good armchair? where the struggle by the artist to produce it is not evident in the final result.

The changes in his painting from show to show may appear minor as the subject matter remains the same ? landscapes, heads and sometimes still life or fish ? often painted in what appears at first to be in a similar vein. Deeper contemplation however reveals an artist who is in fact always on the move and doing something new ? not so much from a formal point of view but perhaps more as a reflection of the artist?s mental and emotional state at the time. To some degree all of the works are ?self-portraits? as was pointed out in a catalogue essay some years ago.

MICHAEL WESTON is a painter?s painter ? he has been painting out of necessity for nearly fifty years and indeed began with paper tacked up beside his Father, the painter Reginald Weston, in the studio when he was a boy of ten years old. Some other artists may be more in vogue; fall in and out of fashion etc but Weston keeps on carrying on and producing work of extraordinary mindfulness and quality. He is not interested in innovation for it?s own sake. His quarry is more to make sense of life through his art and allows us to make progress in the same direction through his work.


MICHAEL WESTON was born to an Israeli mother in Palestine in 1943. He has lived and worked in Paris and Brittany since the 1950?s. An extensive solo exhibition career began in 1968 at Moos Gallery in Toronto Canada. Since then he has exhibited in Europe, particularly France, Finland and the UK, as well as Canada and the USA. His work hangs in numerous private collections in Australia.