The Art of Bert Weir by Lisa Daniels
Titanium White Editions, 2010 96 pp,
Forward by
John Inglis
Chair, Department of Fine Art,
Ontario College of Art & Design
1987-1990
It has been my privilege to witness the evolution of Bert Weir’s work in the visual arts during sixty years of friendship since our student days at the Ontario College of
Art.
When it comes to the source of inspiration that gives rise to his art, Bert’s first love is the natural environment. It is his church. Not so much as a place of worship as of communion. It is here that through an act of poetic invention, the seeming solidity of the world of appearances is recast in shimmering, vibrating, ecstatic display in his painting.
The creative process has required him to cultivate and unremitting integrity with his deepest intuitions. There has been no room here for nihilism, irony or conceit. Soul does not allow for these dull tendencies to interfere with expressions of the good, the true, and the beautiful.
Bert’s life work as it is represented in the examples chosen for this book, is the result of following his daemon, his inner spirit as it speaks to him in the silence of his studio. It has been, of necessity, a solitary occupation. All aspects of conventional thinking that are not useful to the creative act are discarded in favour of what is needed to embody the moment of inspiration that must inform the work. In that sense, Bert’s art is original, authentic, and co-creative with the secret energies that dance in the matrix of the natural domain.
Bert Weir 