William Lewis has never been a painter in a hurry. In the eleven years since moving to Boise, Idaho he has quietly worked away in his studio, taking in his new surroundings, and excavating a complex of vernacular, esoteric and fine art sources. In the process, Lewis has compiled a composite visual vocabulary, an amalgam of abstract and figurative elements, which he transforms into vivid canvases and works on paper that are idiosyncratic, surreal and witty. In 2006, after years of occasionally participating in group shows, Lewis had his first solo exhibition at age 40, including over 100 works ranging from wall-spanning oils to unframed, postcard-size gouaches. His career belatedly taking off, Lewis had a second solo show this past September, again at Boise’s J Crist Gallery.

Lewis studied painting at New York’s Parsons School of Design, Hunter College and New York University. Being the 1980s, the German Neo-Expressionist artists were an early influence. Marsden Hartley’s singular, Americanized expressionism is another precursor Lewis has drawn from. Perhaps the major influence on Lewis that is still evident today is the art of Philip Guston—both Guston’s abstract expressionist mode and his later, oddball figurative work. Both artists approach painting with a probing intellect and irreverent imagination, and Lewis’ strange juxtapositions and graphically rendered subjects evoke the same sort of lowbrow physicality Guston came to celebrate.

The evolution of Lewis’ imagery since coming west has been intriguing. The stretches of empty, high desert landscape punctuated by abandoned, weather-distressed billboards, gas station signs, and rusting farm implements had the impact of emptying out his canvases. Isolated objects, utensils or body parts floated on spare backgrounds, some with faint, “pentimento” images sleeping just beneath which lent them a certain desolate look. He also began indulging an interest in illustrated pre-modern texts, whose mixture of fact and fable, science and magic engendered a fantastic, exotic imagery in his oils and gouaches: curious collections of the obscure and the obsolete in which fanciful abstractions shared space with advertising-inspired images. The result was an eccentric, pedestrian surrealism, filled with graphic pictograms and mysteriously animated objects. The works in Lewis’ 2006 exhibit were the culmination of this process. In Green Rag, the floor-level setting hosts disparate objects hanging out in the company of a whirling apparition from the past.

These works also mark a shift in emphasis in Lewis’ consideration of collective memory. His earlier attraction to eroded images gave way to construction projects in paint which Lewis himself describes as “recalling on canvas structured arrangements that offer quiet testimony to the nature of things.” Log piles in landscape settings, improbable makeshift wood structures, and rocks set on palettes as if for sale filled the picture plane in less fanciful works that signaled an increasing melancholia in his art, in harmony, he suggests, with the national pall over disheartening current events. His Wall (2008) is a down-home abstraction composed of logs and patchwork carpentry that has the battened-down muteness of a barricade.

This mood is particularly manifest in Lewis’ latest body of work, entitled “No Nature, Only Things,” which is comprised of smaller-scale, cropped images of single figures and objects in nature. The isolated, inherently lonely subjects recall his empty canvases of six years ago. But these paintings are more forceful, exuding a psychological resonance reminiscent of Van Gogh’s intensely personal expressionism. In works like Chair and Two Rocks, Lewis combines an impulsive use of color and expressive application of pigment, evoking an emotional response to the animate and the inanimate alike. Says the artist: “I don’t have a systematic approach to color. I like surprises, the unpredictable. I like to keep it simple, and sometimes I like to let it rip.”


“Triptych” 3 individual paintings hung together at Lewis’ recent show. 

Left to right:
“Two Rocks,” 2008, oil on canvas, 40" x 30"
“Chair,” 2008, oil on canvas, 40" x 30"
“Cut,” 2008, oil on canvas, 40" x 30"

William Lewis’s recent solo exhibition, “No Nature, Only Things,” could be seen at J Crist Gallery in Boise, Idaho, from September 12 - October 2, 2008.