By Don Urquhart, Times Chronicle
For the latest artistic addition to the Okanagan Art Gallery, a painting career was never part of the plan. But a plan to add some colour to their house led Jenny Lewis down an unexpected artistic path of which she will never look back.
“We were putting colour in our home and I knew an accomplished artist on Granville Island and while she was working I just learned as much as I could from her,” Lewis said at a First Friday event at the gallery earlier this summer.
Having retired from her career job last October, Lewis is fully in art mode with not only a growing portfolio but a growing list of accolades for her stunning abstract paintings. “I’m just dedicated to art now. I’ve got a big studio at home which is nice,” she adds
She says her pieces start with colour, “I love colour”, and then feeling takes over.
“I have no plan in mind, to be honest,” she says of her artwork. “With abstract what you do is the first layer is just a mess of colour, it doesn’t make any sense at all.”
She gives the example of her paintings of ladies. “I had a canvas that was just a mess of colour and I stood back – and this happens with a lot of my paintings – I thought ‘Oh I can see a person’.
“So I started pencilling in a bit of a face, then I started playing with the hair, and then I poured the white around to kind of frame it afterward. There’s no plan,” she reiterates
When asked if there’s ever a circumstance where she sees nothing on the canvas, she laughs, acknowledging it does happen on occasion. “I’ve learned after doing it for 18 years now that not every attempt yields something, in my early days I would get frustrated and upset because it wasn’t showing up.”
She says that with abstract painting in particular, “the canvas will tell me what it needs, it will just show up,” she says. “I’ve learned to trust the process, so when it’s not working, rather than covering it up and starting all over again I’ll just let it be, I’ll just walk away, start another one, and eventually she’ll find her way back to the original canvas and “all of sudden I’ll go again.”
The key to abstract painting is “adding more,” she says. “That’s the beauty of working with acrylic,” she notes. Some of her paintings are mixed media and one of the paintings she points out at the gallery was one she created over top of an old one she didn’t like.
Lewis typically does a series of paintings around whatever emerges from the canvas and grabs hold of her imagination. This includes for example, her ladies, the colourful mountains and the cityscapes.
Her colourful mountains are layer upon layer of acrylic paint that has been diluted so it almost looks like a watercolour. Then she poured some dilute white acrylic to frame the mountains.
“When I do cityscapes people ask me ‘What city is that?’’” With a laugh, she says she typically replies: “What city do you want it to be?” This is because, unlike typical city or landscape paintings where an artist would work off a photo or sketch of an actual cityscape or landscape, all of her work comes straight out of her imagination.
Lewis is also involved with the Summerland Arts Council as the group’s volunteer co-chair. She’s also organized some events with wineries, including a few with the Okanagan Crush Pad Winery where she got four or five artists together for some show at the winery
This summer saw one of her cityscape paintings featured as the cover artwork for Grain magazine along with a handful of images of her artwork and an interview inside. Grain self-describes itself as a journal of eclectic writing, “a literary quarterly that publishes engaging, eclectic, and challenging writing and art by Canadian and international writers and artists.”
And earlier this summer she also entered an online art competition where she placed 12th overall out of over 500 artists.
Jenny Lewis’ work can be seen at the Okanagan Art Gallery at 8302 Main Street, Osoyoos, tel: 778-437-2238 and online at okanaganartgallery.com. The gallery will be hosting its monthly wine and cheese First Friday event with many of the artists on hand.
