Sheldon Museum of Art
Date of this Version
1972
Citation
Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, April 4-April 30, 1972
Abstract
INTRODUCTION
Looking at and becoming excited about painted images is a somewhat old-fashioned, doubtful thing to do. After all, this is the era of the cool, impersonal, environmental and conceptual varieties of detachment, which make suspect all images having emotional impact. If such images carry the traces of a contemporary personality and of a gut-feit, hand made commitment, how are we to account for them? Yet, why must we account for them? If they are of high quality, then questions of how and why become impertinent.
Bob Weaver's paintings and prints are of this rare species, and as such present themselves as a flat, uncritical and unequivocal record of experience. His images possess an all over emphasis of form that makes viewing them something like a sudden, inescapable blow. Yet, in the painter's closeness to the subject and to the curling line of pigment, there is a reassuring gentleness.
Rarely has the Midwest produced a talent as strong as Bob Weaver. His pictures are as strong in the seeing as they are in the relentless discipline of their making. Both "Big Blue 182" and "World War I Ace" took months to complete. And, praise the Lord, the final result is a direct, unfashionable humanity.