In the studio of Peter Wayne Lewis
An interview by RUTH HARDINGER and C. MICHAEL norton
Luminous swathes of color dance on canvases ganged together forming rectangular grids that cover most of the walls of Lewis’s studio. A large table crowds the center of the space, another holds a mountain of worked brushes and squeezed paint tubes suggestive of the gritty materiality. We are engulfed by the presence and scale of the large paintings, partly because we can only stand a few feet back from them. Peter picks up a photo of an aged Caribbean woman in a flower-printed dress.
PETER WAYNE LEWIS; This is my grandmother, who passed away at 98 last year. We [her family] talked about immortalizing her, I suggested that I mix some of her ashes with my paint. [He shows the ashes.]
RUTH HARDINGER: That’s power! It’s not going to be a portrait of her, is it?
PWL: It’s about her essence and the spirit that was left after her flesh died. Painting is always about breathing life into inanimate materials; it fuses a spirit or entity into an object.
C. MICHAEL Norton: What is her heritage? Was she Jamaican? Where do you come from?
PWL: My grandmother was Jamaican of Portuguese, African, German, and English descent; the thing about the Caribbean is that it’s always been a melting pot. I was born in Jamaica, and I lived there nine years before we migrated to Panama and California.
RH: The “High Times, Hard Times” catalogue [of an exhibition about art of the late 1960s and early 1970s] discusses Howardina Pindell’s work being dismissed at the Studio Museum of Harlem because it wasn’t black enough — the concept [being] that black artists should do art about black cultural issues
PWL: In my painting I’m always trying to transcend race and culture. I am aware of cultural and racial issues and differences, but have chosen to look into the nature of the substances that build the world of appearances that we call existence. Light is an essential part of this equation.
RH: But, art history has held many non-Western artists – and their artistic traditions — on the outside.
PWL: The ruling class of art politics! If it’s not painters that fall into a rubric, like Jackson Pollock, they fall out of the pail.
Artaud once said that culture does not exist in museums; it’s in our bodies, our blood, bones, and the fluidity of our nerves. I want to get inside the nerves, the double helix, and use this as a portal to the beginning. That’s the only way I know to make objects that carry meaning.
CMN: Your work was much denser when you first got to New York. Now you’ve lightened it. Your touch is softer and more fluid. How did you get there?
PWL: You’re in a unique position because you’ve seen my earlier work. Here’s the question: Does one accept one’s sense of the self or does one address different facets of one’s personality?
It’s like I wanted to take on the New York School — its specific language and trajectory. I was raised on Pollock, Rothko, Kline, De Kooning, and wanted to see if it was possible to work within this language and create something fresh. One of my mentors, Fred Spratt, said: “Peter, you cannot break new ground, it’s all broken, but if you look into the fissures of the cracks in the ground, maybe there are some opportunities there.”
I knew instinctively, formally, spiritually, aesthetically, how to make a painting, and I was getting big hits on it. Paying homage to New York, I was going to the Art Mecca, and I was going to duke it out with these cats, and not just as a game. It was like retooling.
CMN: It is about obtaining some satisfaction and doing a chase, with the goal in mind, and then when you get that goal you have to overtake it …
RH: One of the exciting qualities in your current work is its lushness. It’s juicy, very sexual. But it’s also funny.
CMN: I love the humor
RH: The classic Abstract Expressionists were involved in the heroic, the profound, and the non-humorous — except for Philip Guston’s late work. They were all dead serious.
PWL: Quintessentially, the sublime can be humorous. That was where everyone wanted to reside — sublime being all; the magnificent horror and beauty of nature and embracing all of that. There’s always a duality: One can take oneself very seriously, but at the same time have serious fun.
RH: The red nipples in your painting are totally goofy.
PWL: Red nipples? What you see is your business! (Much laughter.) I don’t happen to see red nipples! That’s not my scene. Let me suggest something to you: When I saw into this painting, I saw a Buddha on a lotus with those red forms. Richard Wollenheim, the writer, discusses “seeing in” like a cloud, and conjuring imagery. You might see Mickey Mouse ears, or a ship. We try to create a symbol to navigate pictures and understand what we are seeing.
There’s a French word, écriture, which means writing. There is a scripting, a language, but there is no lexicon for assigning “this is nipple,” “this is this … ”
Take what Jasper Johns was doing, he was writing red when applying green; he was playing this whole business of signage, language, semiotics. However, it’s the symbology that one may see in Johns’s paintings that I find interesting, even though I am not painting from a mimetic point of view.
CMN: What happens for me, Peter, is that I have developed a form of painting that lets me create a dialogue to explore. It’s like when you write a book. You make a draft, and then another draft, and then you have a story.
PWL: I understand what you are saying: That there can be a narrative about the painting. My work is not really about that. Outside of my initial intention I leave myself open to possibilities, and tap into the wellspring of the human condition, or the collective unconscious, which is real and tangible.
Artistic intent — if one understands what the artist intended, there’s a greater connection. It’s like an ‘ah-ha!’ Conversely, artistic intention is only one facet of understanding. Great paintings have interpretations outside of artistic intentions. Art is an expansive enterprise outside the maker of these objects.
RH: How do you construct these paintings?
PWL: They are acrylic paintings; I lay out a sequence of opportunities, in terms of color, in terms of brushes. When I go to these paintings I think about jazz, I try to recreate myself every time I pick up the brush. I want to make a gesture or mark that is brand new for me.
There’s a vocabulary of form, no question. There is a relationship between the works, there has to be because it is coming out of me. It’s not deliberately conscious, I can’t tell you exactly that I’m going to do this and that. I leave myself open for accidents and the potential of the materials.
RH: How do you know that brown piece with the red dots on it goes here versus over there?
PWL: What you are talking about is sequencing of individual canvases. We are looking at 15 individual paintings which were made as separate entities. I make one at a time; probably made 18 pieces this size. Then I sit down and start sequencing. I determine that I’m going to make a painting that has 15 units, part of the logic of my paintings is the units of 9, 12, 15, sometimes it’s 6. I sequence the canvases together to make a singular painting. How I came to sequencing that one in the right-hand corner is just taste. It just felt right. To get to this sort of compositional arrangement took me months, because I sit and sequence.
CMN: What I’m hearing you say is: you are comfortable going outside what we consider aesthetics.
PWL: I am investigating properties of vision and how I may be able to look deep inside to connect to the beginnings of time and the origins of the universe. There is String Theory that discusses the majesty of existence and the Cosmo. I am concerned with how to feel the lyrical rhythm of the world. One could say this is a spiritual covenant. I am trying to reorder a different notion of what could be beautiful. Maybe that’s arrogance.
CMN: I don’t see that as arrogant, its part of the job and the work. In spite of the contradiction, there is definitely artistic intent.
PWL: Intention is in my paintings: My greatest goal is to look deeper and to leave a residue of that investigation.
Peter Wayne Lewis has exhibited his work from New York to Beijing. He is currently involved in the Kunstpavillion in Der Neuen Mitte Europas “Licht und Schatten,” Stachesried, Germany, and is represented by Rosenberg + Kaufman Fine Art, NYC. He is chairman of the 2D Department of Art, Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. Further information may be found at www.peterwaynelewis.com
Ruth Hardinger and C. Michael Norton are artists who also write about art.
