Drawings by Stanley Lewis

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I was interested in learning how to better see and describe what makes Charity Baker’s drawings and paintings so captivating, and she gave me a list of her teachers from the New York Studio School. Goldmine! I posted drawings by her teacher Barbara Grossman yesterday. Today I found drawings by Stanley Lewis. Although the two are entirely different styles, you may notice some similarities in the methods. Both rely on descriptions of space, form, and pathways to the rectangle. Both produce artworks that are worked, and worked hard, with bold dark marks erased and moved, erased again and re-recorded, producing a composition that is dense and intense with information.

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This wide variety of artistic styles but consistency in compositional strength is why I am so excited that we have four instructors from NYSS teaching with us right now: Charity Baker, Fran O’Neill, Jonathan Harkham, and Shruti Ghatak. These artists have all been taught this way of making artwork that feels so incredibly present and engaging, while never resorting to a schtick, or display of skill. These methods integrate space, form, time, and process in a way I’d never known. When I was in school this incredibly powerful process was reduced to “Cezanne wasn’t an impressionist, he was doing his own thing” and no one ever told me what the heck that “thing” was that Cezanne was doing. Now I get it, and I see it everywhere. I feel like I’ve found an entire subculture in art that I didn’t know existed, and now that I’ve been shown how to access it, I see some form of it in all the works that impact me. (Special thanks to Fran O’Neill for getting me started, and Jonathan Harkham for pushing me to unlearn unwanted habits with the paint.)

In these drawings by Stanley Lewis, the artist has recorded the relationships of space and form as it was observed in small moments, not broad sweeps of expectations. This slows the viewer down to look, and follow the artist’s attention as applied to individual relationships built up across the page. It follows 2 point perspective, but it also incorporates differing eye levels and moments in time. It moves, like Cezanne’s works moved, as they integrated multiple perspectives within the page.

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In an interview on Painting Perceptions, the painter Ruth Miller described Stanley Lewis’ artworks as “passionate, unrelenting, obsessive, brave, true, generous, mad, visionary. But his work is also about the hard won image, about detail and layering, loving attention, spacial volumes, formal concerns, dogged devotion, about the concrete and about process.” Lewis draws with a process from Cezanne, a process that involves intense observation to create spatial, physical relationships, and dynamic pathways.

“I’m always amazed by how hard it is to paint, especially painting from perception. It can be one of the most bizarre things you can do. I don’t find it an objective, clear thing to do. I’m overwhelmed by all that it can really involve if you are trying to get at the things I’m trying to do.” – Stanley Lewis

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“[Painting from perception] often feels like a horribly impossible thing to do but you somehow do it anyway. How do you do it? I have figured out is you do need to use some kind of formulas. I’m not afraid to say this anymore.”

“One formula involves figuring out the proportions and using a frame; that helps determine the relationship between all the tree branches and their surroundings–where the verticals and horizontals intersect–how to unify and relate spatially to each other. It can get very complicated; it’s difficult to explain. When you try to get everything working like this you realize that it actually can’t be done. How do you find a consistent stabilizing position? That’s what I’m interested in and that’s what I’ve been trying to do for my whole life.” – Stanley Lewis on Painting Perceptions

“I think of the viewer as myself. I want the viewer to be where I was and to understand what I am doing, which is complicated. I turn my head from side to side to find my picture. I want to get from here to there, not just see a unified central image. I can’t expect the viewer to work that hard so I struggle to unify the sides.” – Stanley Lewis on Painting Perceptions

“I prefer working in manner that is more of a “working class” vision of how things look. I believe in being struck by the beauty of what you see in nature, like how you might sit next to me outside and remark on how great the light was on some green leaves looked or how the wires against the sky could make a wonderful subject for a painting. We’re seeing the same things, the way it looks beautiful today. There is something about going after the simplicity and authenticity of appearances that is what Derain was about. I believe in appearances rather than a systematic method of making a painting work in terms of something like an abstract rhythm. That’s how Leland Bell might put it.”

“At the same time I also struggle to get all the pieces to fit. If you push it too far it can backfire on you and start to become abstraction. Sometimes I think it’s more clear when you paint abstract because of how it shows more readily what you’re going for and not get confused with the appearance of the things observed in the motif. Trying to get things to sit and work together in the way you want – it often doesn’t work.” – Stanley Lewis on Painting Perceptions

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