Charlie Hewitt

Artist STATEMENT

Charlie Hewitt’s practice is one of constant experimentation that began in the New York of the 1960s, initially influenced by the New York School. Though largely based on painting and drawing in those heady years, today Hewitt works in multiple media, including print making, drawing, painting, neon and LED-illuminated sculpture, metal, ceramic and digital art. What threads through all of these is an inescapable grounding in the freedom of drawing and the techniques of print making.

Whether this methodology results in imagery that is figurative or abstract, everything begins with drawing. His compulsive “doodling” feeds a visual iconography extrapolated from his richly varied life. Stylized tool shapes harken to carpentry work that funded his art career. Cards and dice refer to the gambles and risks of life, daring to win but willing to fail, all in the service of a creative life. Marquee signs allude to a magical, optimistic time of road travel in America, which were formative during road trips of his youth. But even the abstract shapes he employs in nonrepresentational compositions originate with pen or colored pencil on paper. Hewitt believes that the lexicon that arose from these doodles eventually helped release him from the shadow of New York School style.

Hewitt works in two studios, approaching each with completely different orientations. One is his lightworks studio, a converted greenhouse where he allows himself the freedom to play, producing illuminated sculpture and digital art. The words and imagery that comprise this subject matter are like autonomic writing, not ponderously conceived but filled with personal meaning, even in their perceived humor and lightheartedness.

The other studio is where Hewitt paints in a state of what he describes as a daily meditation or devotion toward Western European art traditions. Here, he achieves a balance with his lighter side through the humility inculcated by his classical training, where his materials and techniques demand discipline and rigor. These works often find inspiration in print making techniques, incorporating abstract shapes cut from handmade papers that are coated with paint and pressed onto canvas, frequently also collaging with other shapes onto the surface. This is arguably his most liberated work, free of content and narrative, but filled with and openness and expression he has finally learned not to question. Combined, these seemingly divergent impulses comprise a holistic life and oeuvre that is at once high and low, banal and precious, comic and sober, quotidian and spiritually transcendent.