Arts and culture: Landscape as language
Transcript
Michael Lewis:
Art is a way of feeling more deeply, but it can be a catalyst for experience. You experience something more fully and more intensely if you’re trying to make a work of art out of it.
Then it becomes a record of what you were thinking, where you’ve been, what you care about over the years, and it might show how that changes. Looking at an artist’s work is both an insight into their thinking, and also a record of the changes that they made.
When I started working with wash, the thing that was so exciting was that I had no idea what it was going to look like. I’d move the paint, and as I would paint, it would intuitively and spontaneously gravitate toward landscape. But it wasn’t about the landscape. That’s the only thing I mean. I do paint landscapes, but it’s not the goal to show you a particular place.
Laurie Hicks:
Michael is clear evidence of the importance of depth in what you’re doing, and not just the representation of what you see, but how you take the representation and create a sense of meaning and relationship to it. I think Michael’s landscapes are very clearly that.
It’s all a matter of pulling information, ideas, thinking, reading, conceptualizing, and then finding a set of marks, and a language for communicating that in some way.
Michael Lewis:
It’s a genre, especially in Maine, that people trust, and when they trust, they relax. They know that they understand what it’s an image of, and I think that’s comforting, in a way. My goal is to take them beyond that, either consciously or unconsciously, and see if it’s possible to communicate some of those inner feelings.
In my mind, there’s nothing that’s wholly positive. There’s darkness and light, and they vie with each other. That’s the metaphor that I investigate the most.
Laurie Hicks:
There’s something recognizable about his work. You can’t go places out and about without seeing a Mike Lewis sky. For the rest of my life, I’ll say, “There’s a Mike Lewis sky,” because we see these kinds of moments. We don’t see them as long periods of time.
They’re moments that pass us by, but there’s something that is experiential, that we internalize, that Mike’s images pull out of us. And that sense of awe, the sense of also being very small in a very big world.
Michael Lewis:
I don’t want to be making statements that don’t recognize the human faults and fragilities. I have to keep balancing what’s going on in the light and beautifully bright areas, and what’s going on in the darker realms.
Laurie Hicks:
There’s that old saying about, “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” Michael can, and he teaches. He is so passionate about his work that he is always ready to talk about that, and to share that with somebody. That builds an immediate bridge.
I think more importantly, as a teacher, he brings that same passion to somebody else’s work. He’s always wanting to talk about somebody else’s work. He’s not somebody who is all about Michael at all. It’s about other people, and his engagement with them.
Michael Lewis:
What I try to do is show people the possibilities. I don’t even give them a lot of technical advice. I show them the possibilities, and the excitement of working in a serious, committed way.
Lucy Ericson:
Michael Lewis is definitely one of the best people I’ve met in college. He’s been amazing, not only as a professor, but as a person for me, through college. I’ve learned so, so much from him.
Laurie Hicks:
Because Mike has been here, not since the very beginning of the art department, but very close to the very beginning. He was one of the very first faculty and he’s still here 50 years later. He’s created a history. He’s created a sense of memory that I think is critical to any institution, as well as to the individuals in the institution.
Michael Lewis:
When you get started, you have complete freedom. You can go anywhere you want. Choose a color, and just go with it. After you’ve worked on it for a while, your freedom is very limited, because now you have to finish it as a finished work of art, keeping some of that same spontaneity, but having already established where you want the painting to go. It’s a challenge.
I’m going to be retired Aug. 31. I don’t know what the direction might be, and that’s so much scary as intriguing. I know there’s going to be a change, I don’t know what it’s going to mean. I haven’t designed any solution, except to try to keep getting to the studio.