Charlie Hewitt: Night Shifts
In Night Shifts, Charlie Hewitt’s paintings are caught in constant flux. Colors mix and break apart, forms dissolve and reconstitute, abstractions become recognizable shapes before abstracting again. Veins of midnight-black pigment thread through the surfaces like connective tissue, binding together the fields of shifting light and pigment.
Hewitt's longtime day job as a contractor informs these works in unexpected ways. Stylized tool shapes emerge from swaths of color, suggesting that the hand which measures and carefully constructs by day is simultaneously drawn to the unmeasurable territories of painting. These are meditations on transition: the shift from day to night and back to day, from blueprint to creation, from building up to breaking down. They are paintings born out of a metaphorical night shift, when the measured world unveils its unmeasurable potential.
