ALCOHOL- CRAFT BEER

Photographers, writers, they get into ruts, and so I picked up the digital art and kind of got the juices fl owing again. After I do that for a while, then I really feel like going out and taking pictures. “It’s inspiring,” Weathers said.

Sidelined Things were going fi ne until 2006, when a cancer diagnosis threatened one of his “windows to the mind.” “I had a melanoma from my time doing white-water rafting, on my eyeball,” he said. “The way it was explained to me is anything you get on your skin, you can get on your eyes. It was removed in 2006. Not my dominant, my shooting eye, so I was fortunate there. They took it out, removed it, said everything was good.”

In 2019, however, things were not good. “They found out it had metastasized and went into my lymph nodes and it was everywhere. I had to quit my job and my wife and I owned a hotel, we sold the hotel and came back to Great Bend. We wanted to be close to family and my dad, LeRoy Weathers, who has since passed.”

In the years that followed, Weathers has traveled back and forth from New Mexico to Kansas, where he maintains residences. “There is no solid routine,” he said. The cancer is being controlled, but words like “remission” and “cancerfree” are yet to be voiced, he said.

“They don’t use those words,” Weathers noted. “I have been out of treatment a year and a half, and statistically if it comes back it will come back within two years.”

In the meantime, Weathers has expanded his art foray further into the digital realm.

His photographs cover a wide range of categories, from churches to trains to spots in Kansas and other states.

His digital artwork, however, is a real look into the inner Weathers.

Mythical creatures, like unicorns and steampunk cats, abound; so do aliens at work and at play on Earth and at home; fairies, angels, demons and series prints on scary dolls and origins of the universe leap to life on Weathers’ laptop in splashes of digital color.

“It’s inspiring,” Weathers said. “Photographers, writers, they get into ruts, and so I picked up the digital art and kind of got the juices fl owing again. After I do that for a while, then I really feel like going out and taking pictures.”

When he’s not creating, Weathers enjoys time spent with people, especially other artists.

“My idea of a fun artist experience is just a few artists sitting around,” he said. “We could spend an entire afternoon having coffee one day a week or a month, just hanging out together and sharing ideas.”

And he’d have his camera handy, just in case.