JON WEALLEANS

‘It may be reasonable to suggest, that Jon Wealleans –  fine and honest artist that he is – paints the way he does because he knows how intrinsic to his own creative process is the concept of ordered chaos: a seemingly random agglomeration of objects, that yet contain within their interrelation the lineaments of the mind that assembled them. Far from harkening back to the Old Masters, Wealleans’ paintings evoke shamanic ‘symbol sets’: ritual objects which are arranged then re-arranged in order to provoke remote effects’.
‘In place of the unified focal length of the photographic image, Wealleans substitutes the saccades of the human eye as it surveys a prospect, zooming in and out, panning continually. This is, of course, quite like an analogue of memory itself, as it ranges over space and time… While his paintings at first glance seem fairly straightforward, on closer inspection they suck you into their golden glow of be-here-nowness’.

WILL SELF