b. 1986
2004     Leaves Nova Scotia for the first time (Tsunami)      
2005      Cuba; scholarship to study painting at the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design     
2008     Studies painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; father is lost at sea; returns to Halifax.
2009     Studio beside painter Gerald Ferguson, who is making rubbings before his death.      
2010     Travels to Paris with award from the French embassy in New Brunswick, CA. First encounter with European painting.
2011     Mayor's Prize pays for Berlin studio on Koppenstraße, 10423
2012      Temporary studio in Halifax Roy Building extends to 2014; ("Five Studies").
2013      Shortlisted for Canada's Painting Prize.
2014      Roy Building is demolished. Moves 11 times in two years. Returns to Berlin.
2015;     "Immortal Invisible" (National Filmboard of Canada).
2018;     Summers on Cape Breton Island; paints "Yellow Bird," begins clearing land in Aspy Bay
2020;     Pandemic. Second Summer clearing land; digs foundation.
2021;     Cuts driveway through woods to clearing. First monochromes
2022;     Begins building summer studio on Cape Breton Island. First Frescos 

Aaron Weldon has worked almost entirely independently. He studied painting at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design with Garry Neill Kennedy and painting and animation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been presented at the National Gallery of Canada; Owens Art Gallery, Flash Art International, PlugIn ICA, Confederation Centre Art Gallery, Georgia Scherman Projects; received awards and prizes from different levels of government in Canada, Germany, France. If you are interested in a CV please email info@aaronweldon.ca

AB. "Over the last twenty years there's a lot of continuity, say, from 2005 when you're in Havana until the painting 'Taste Test.' Then something changes. Suddenly you go back to formal portraiture. Eventually the portraits lead to the 'Proof Paintings,' and then there's a chalk-line. This is evidence of something like a missing body or a subject missing from the center and you start to repeat this shape, and refer to it as a constant, like a word or a number. Does that sound right?         Yes.         When I first saw the painting "Yellow Bird"—        —you thought it was a joke.      Yes, I'm still not sure how to look at it.       I know what you mean. Last week I was at the Gemäldegalerie and I noticed how people look at paintings, usually for about ten or fifteen seconds. Pretty fast. When a painting's on your own wall you see it in another way, Maybe you look at the painting for two or three seconds in the morning or at night so that's thirty seconds in a week. Let's say about two minutes in a month. In a year, that's about thirty minutes. After three or four years you've seen the painting for an hour and a half or two hours but by now most of the topics have changed, subjects have come and gone. What's left on your wall is a surface and you either get the feeling it's empty, or the painting holds up.       Are you focusing on the surface?      I work on the surface, it's not the really the focus. I think you're asking what I’m painting?      Yes.      The frescos aren’t images.       What are they?      Stones are ground into pigments and then that’s mixed with limewater and then—      —I mean if they aren’t images, what are they?      The frescos are more like values.       This form you repeat, how did you commit to that shape?      I'm not sure. I was studying evidence and I had this chalkline and every morning I saw it in another way. At the time I was also looking at sacred paintings and I realized the form was like those, except this icon in the center kept changing from the corner of my eye. One morning I just realized that, if you're going to see something in another way, you have to be looking at the same thing.       And that's how the shape became a constant?      Yes."
[continued in "Papers"]

[continued from "Paintings"]
AB. I remember I visited you years ago and you said you had noticed a problem with images. Then I didn't see you for a few years and I heard you were writing, could you talk about that time?    AW What I saw was a visual problem so I got up every morning and tried to solve it visually, by hand but as I got further into it, I started to notice something more serious, and The scale [of the problem] kept growing. At some point I realized, I had to start over completely.     Was it a creative crisis?     I worked in private for about a decade.     And this is when you went to Cape Breton Island.    Well, I went to Aspy Bay because the colours are so strong there and I cleared land; worked on my truck, that sort of thing, and it helped.     How?     Well, I was writing a lot and pretty much living outside and then I started to notice what I called "programs." At that point it was like my grammar changed. I could write and draw but drawing or writing about things was like talking in third-person. Then for a few years nothing fit together for me, the world only made sense as poetry. Even the paintings were resolved poetically.        Were you publishing?     Sometimes. Mostly anonymously or for friends when they asked.       What do you mean the crisis wasn't personal?     I mean that the problems weren’t mine, I just didn't know how to deal with them. For example, when I came across Nelson Goodman's "Fact, Fiction and Forecast" I recognized his issue with induction immediately. It was the problem I saw in memory wire. Counter-factual conditionals and his "law-like statements," I had been calling them "programs." The next morning I walked to the Staatsbibliothek and found Frege, Kripke, Tarski, Carnap, Anselm, Quine. What they noticed in language I had been seeing in images.       The problem was formal.       You could say that.     I’m thinking of your paper “Invisibility and the Word,” the realization that you can paint a number or a word just as easily as a tulip, it doesn't seem like that would affect you personally.      No but I was able to keep painting, even when I had given up on images, because paintings aren't images. Painting is the invention of images. You're working on how you see, which you might say is very personal.       So the constant is not some new thing; or something new in itself, but a way to see the same thing as if it were new.      Yes, exactly. You have to keep starting over everyday. Painting and writing are very humble activities. Every day is new.