TheRealIssue

Issue #4, Mar 2005

Designs on the Sky

Artwork by Jeffrey Lewis

Jeffrey Lewis is a professor of art at Auburn University, Alabama.
He has taught for the past 17 years in painting and drawing.

The choice of encaustic was suggested to me while in graduate school by one of my mentors at the University of Iowa. At the time I thought it was too complicated and costly. Within four years, though, I was painting in the encaustic medium, and have continued to do so for the past fifteen years. I have used encaustic in producing still life, landscape and a few portraits, although the majority of works produced have been sky scapes.

An encaustic painting results from incorporating melted beeswax, a colored pigment, and a hardener (usually a resin), and distributing this mixture(s) on a surface with brushes and tools to create the image. The name encaustic derives from the Greek word meaning ‘a burning in or inustion,’ thus signifying the final stage in the painting process during which a heated element is passed over the painting, thereby fusing the layers of paint and creating a permanent image.

I use encaustic because I respond to the tactile nature of the medium. It can be made transparent or opaque; it can be applied in veils of washes or thick impasto; it has an inherent ability to impart an inner luminosity and subtlety of tone; it dries quickly and so facilitates rapid changes of direction/thought during the painting process. The medium has been particularly appealing in my sky paintings because these works begin very abstractly, improvisational and intuitively, arriving at their finished state only after much re-painting, scraping and re-starts.

When I was a child, I spent a great deal of time out-of-doors . . . at the beach, either at Lake Ontario or Keuka Lake, one of the New York State’s Finger Lakes. Through these years of growing up and being in the landscape so intimately I think a deep impression of the Creator’s presence in nature took hold within me. When the “Towards Ontario” series of paintings began, it was out of a dual response to, and longing for, childhood, as well as a remembrance of and commemoration of beauty as found in creation.

I try to convey a sense of contemplation, quietness, awe, and occasionally drama within the paintings. I want to slow the view down—to make the viewer spend time with the painting. When I think of the craftsmen who were building the great cathedrals of Europe, most of them knew that they were working for and in God’s kingdom. Just by being good craftsmen, they knew they were fulfilling their ‘calling.’ This is the kind of attitude I try to sustain as an artist and as a teacher. When I am able, by Grace, to do this I have a sense of satisfaction and contentment.

When I am painting landscapes I often read in the Psalms, especially where it speaks of the earth making a joyful noise to the Lord, to the sea roaring, the floods clapping its hands, the hills being joyful; or, in the last few chapters of the Book of Job, where God asks Job where he was when the heavens were being laid out, or fashioning the earth, or fixing the boundaries of the seas. The New Testament’s depiction of Christ’s authority over storms at sea, healing physically afflicted people, his resurrection, all these events and more, remind us that God is sovereign over his creation.

I hope to gently remind viewers of God’s character and presence in space and time. The arcs seen in the skies of my paintings represent an example of this. Many people will view these as contrails from a jet. For me however, they are a visible representation of God the Creator having dominion over his creation by playfully, (why not? Play is a part of our personhood), making marks or designs on the sky, not unlike us when we ‘doodle’ on the edge of a piece of paper. This of course has theological implications as it means that we live in an ‘open universe,’ one in which God has authority and still works. One, which in my field as a visual artist I seek to give proclamation to.