Biography
Karl Martin Weschke (b. Taubenpreskeln, Germany 1925 - d. 2005), abandoned by his mother to an orphanage at the age of 2, although reclaimed five years later, originally came to England as a prisoner of war at Radwinter, an open camp near Cambridge, having been captured by the Canadians whilst in the military in 1943 and a member of the Hitler Youth. There he worked on the camp newspaper, designed theatre sets and attended a course of lectures on art, organised by the Cambridge Unversity extra-mural studies board, which introduced him to his German cultural heritage - that of the Expressionists whose paintings had been branded degenerate by the Nazis. After the war, he enrolled at St Martin's School of Art, but left after a term, restless and keen to travel. Although he had initially wanted to become a sculptor, trips to Italy and Spain determined that he would be a painter. In 1948 Weschke married the animator Alison de Vere (1927-2001) who had studied at the Royal Academy, but later divorced.
Weschke moved to Cornwall in 1955, eventually settling, in 1960, in a small house on Cape Cornwall, overlooking the sea that would form the backdrop for his paintings. He had in a one-man show at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1974 and in 1979 he was selected for inclusion in the Arts Council's first British Art show, and, the following year, he held a one-man exhibition at Kettle's Yard, Cambridge, from which the Tate Gallery purchased a painting. The Contemporary Art Society acquired Lizz in Repose in 1984 and donated it to Ferens Art Gallry in Hull. Tate acquired three further paintings in 1994, allocated a room to his work in 1996 and put on a retrospective exhibition at Tate St Ives in 2003. In the same year he was awarded the German Order of Merit and the keys to Gera, near his original home, in Thüringen; received an Honorary Doctorate from the the Arts Institute at Bournemouth and married Petronilla Silver, who had been the Director of the Contemporary Art Society (1982-92) and whom he had met in 1986. He was never a central member of the St Ives School, since his allegiance to abstraction was shortlived, but he was a close friend of Bryan Wynter, Roger Hilton and the poet W. S. Graham.
