Born in New York City, Weissman entered
Yale to be an oceanographer but exited with
a BA in Sociology/Creative Writing. After
time writing in San Francisco, his love of drawing led him to the Southern California Institute of Architecture/Los Angeles, a B.Arch. and M.Arch., and a move back to
New York City to practice. In 1992 economics and wanderlust moved his practice to Kauai.
A 2003 decision to take a one- or two-year sabbatical, and pursue a long-time dream of art school, turned into three-and-a-half
years at the University of Hawaii-Manoa, classes turned into a residency, and student critiques turned into gallery shows. He currently works at both his home studio and the Honolulu Printmakers. He has exhibited
in museums and galleries in New York City, Los Angeles, and throughout Hawaii.

Though greatly enamored of the immediacy of painting, it was the physicality and pro-cesses of printmaking that captured him. Stone lithography in particular - the weight and coolness of the stone, the alchemical qualities of turning scratches and marks on stone into images pulled from pools of ink and water, the forces of the hand press - became his favored medium of expression.

While searching for a way to loosen up his tight maniere-noire lithographs, he began to experiment with large woodcuts of images related to ecological disasters, seeing a correlation between the woodcut’s broad, bold strokes and the magnitude of these disasters’ impact. This resulted in the work 26 April 86 + 17, the depiction of the Strontium-90 dust cloud after the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown, followed by Carbo, deal-ing with fossil fuels and rising sea levels. Inspired by Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table, the elemental aspect of these two pieces led to Weissman’s decision to continue exam-ining man’s relationship to the elements - the basic building blocks of the universe - as a mirror to reflect upon, and question, prevalent values and conditions.
Individual and societal relationships, with each other and the planet, fuel the narra-tives, while exploring how process and image interact to create meaning. Juxtaposing images and metaphors, the general and the specific, pictorial illusion against elements in real scale, Weissman’s works are built out of layers of different printmaking techniques, colors, and textures to create visually rich surfaces, to draw the viewer in, as well as to articulate the complexity of the subjects and world. The resulting images aim at a visceral response, a pause, to then think and reflect.