Alan James Weiss

The artist

Practice and perspective

Alan James Weiss is a South African painter based in Cape Town. Born in Kitwe, Zambia, he began painting at fourteen before building a professional career in design and architecture. His background in those disciplines informs a painterly attention to perspective, proportion, spatial relationships and colour. He studied design in London and earned a B.A. Honours degree from Middlesex University. In 2012 he returned to oil painting with renewed commitment, developing a practice that encompasses figurative portraiture, wildlife and landscape.

Weiss works primarily in oils on linen canvas. His reference points include the Dutch Golden Age and artists such as Rembrandt, Hals and Vermeer, alongside later painters including John Singer Sargent and Andrew Wyeth. Although grounded in representation, his work is open to changes in technique and approach rather than a single fixed style. Southern African experience remains an important source of subject matter, while recent figurative paintings also engage social and historical questions. The emotional encounter with the viewer is central to his stated aims: personal experience becomes an invitation for others to recognise something of their own lives. His exhibition history includes the Occhi Contemporary solo presentations Out of Africa in 2022 and Transition in 2023.

Education

B.A. Honours, Middlesex University, London.

Solo exhibitions

Out of Africa (2022) and Transition (2023), Occhi Contemporary.