Gayle Lewis

Pin-Ups by Gayle Lewis will be on display from October 1-31. An opening reception will be held Saturday October 3, 4-5 pm.

Artist Statement:

I’ve always been an artist. That’s how I see it now, anyway. And there’s some evidence for it. In my senior year of high school I won a national Scholastic Magazine art scholarship which took me out of the Midwest to study at what had been the Art School of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, which had just then become part of the University of Hartford. I later returned to the Midwest, became a fine arts major and married my painting teacher, who was the conceptual artist William Wegman.

Bill taught at U. Wisconsin, Madison and I graduated from there with a BFA in Painting. His famous dog, Man Ray, was actually our dog, and I appeared often in Bill’s work. You could have seen me pictured in many of the country’s big museums, MOMA, LAMOCA, later the de Young in San Francisco, sometimes with dog, sometimes not. After our divorce I lived in Los Angeles, among all the artists of the then-West Coast school, John Baldissari, Billy Al Bengston, Ed Ruscha, Ed Moses, Dwayne Valentine, the Dill brothers, Jim Ganzer, and so on. And I did much work, furniture designs, sculptural ornament, ribbons for the National Medal of Arts, with my long-term boyfriend, the sculptor Robert Graham, while also designing my private label dresses, art-directing commercials, and finding time eventually to go to architecture school, because the architect Frank Gehry told me I’d be good at it. I wound up teaching a design studio in color with my mentor Frank Israel at UCLA’s School of Architecture and Urban Design.

It was when I met and married my second husband, who was not an artist but a writer, that I returned to painting. I joined the Santa Monica Watercolor Society, a distinguished group, and participated in their shows and soon had my own show, collages of crows, at RUMBA in Santa Monica. In the meantime I began coming to Castine, Maine and began having annual shows at the Judith Leighton Gallery in Blue Hill. The work on display here in Brooklin represents a fair sample of my range of tastes, styles, experiments, and imagination. Curiosity seems to drive me. Most recently I have undertaken a large scale study of water, twenty-seven paintings organized in a grid.

The Show:

These “pin-ups” are copies of watercolor paintings I’ve done in Los Angeles over the last twenty-five years. Due to requirements of the printing process, most of the images are not to scale, but rather are smaller or larger than the originals. The originals range in size from 4”x 4” to 36”x 48”. Several of the pin-ups have been created by a Giclée process, which produces very exact reproductions. Each of the “subject matters” on display here are representative of an extensive series of work, desserts, fish, birds, landscapes, knives, water, et cetera.