Statement:

My interest in transforming Maine’s varied natural environment into images evoking inner states of mind, emotion, mystery, and spirit continues. Making the paintings and viewing the paintings are equal processes of discovery.

The series Jumping Towards the Light was a surprise. The jumping figure appeared unexpectedly and felt so “true” that I continued to pursue it in successive paintings. Because my working process is very intuitive I trust that kind of impulse to carry with it into the paintings the depths of feeling and meaning that I am searching for. The paintings come from a strong emotional energy that doesn’t limit content to one specific metaphor.

The series is a meditation on human aspiration; the desire to go beyond ordinary limits…the urge towards transcendence. The implications are unlimited. The images could be about rising above specific personal circumstances, or constraining social and historical events. They could also be about achieving a freeing sense of spiritual consciousness… something beyond scientific paradigms… connecting with a reality deeper and greater than material existence. 

The Mystic Garden series was driven by the need to feel the sensation of deeply resonant saturated colors, and to play out the drama of luminous warm light against a beautiful but encroaching darkness (with all of the intense associations that are evoked by that archetypal drama). I found the images comforting and wanted to keep going back to those spaces…searching out the nuances, trying to feel the beauty without ignoring the implications of cycles of renewal.

The challenge with all of the paintings is to evoke the ineffable…to point in the direction of things beyond description.

-Michael H. Lewis
 Orono, Maine
 2008