Biography

JON WEALLEANS was born in Yorkshire in 1946. His first studies were in architecture, he then went on to gain a Masters degree in design at the Royal College of Art, achieving a Distinction. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Art. Self taught as an artist, he has also practised as a consultant architect and designer since 1980, as well as lecturing at the Royal College of Art, the Architectural Association and Kingston University.

Jon Wealleans has been represented by Francis Kyle Gallery since 2002 and participated in the theme exhibitions Roma in spring 2003 as well as Everyone Sang: A view of Siegfried Sassoon and his Word by twenty-five painters today. Exceptionally wide ranging in his choice of subjects, Wealleans paints with a bravura technique which gently subverts the realist tradition. "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). Recently he has returned from a working visit to a favourite location, Hampi in southern India, and he has also been extending the range of an ongoing series of small-scale garden studies, his 'garden fragments', adding new subjects from southern France and west Africa.

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