Image: Paul Lewin in his studio
"Some parents might have said, “Don’t try to be an artist, there’s no money in it!” but my parents encouraged me to draw and paint. I think they saw that art was the kind of subject I shone at, and they never put up any barrier to me pursuing that as a vocation.
A successful painting is never a given – there’s no certainty it’s going to work. A lot of my work is about dealing with mistakes and pushing through them. Over the years I’ve pushed paintings to the extreme, so I know what can and can’t be done, and I’ve had lots of failures along the way. Not every painting has been a success."
Image: Offcuts and torn pieces from Paul Lewin's paintings
"Making mistakes is necessary, because that’s where the growth happens. I use the paintings I’m not so happy with to make collages, and over the past few years I’ve been making collages which break out of the standard rectangle. Those broken edges help suggest how we experience the landscape; they are more immersive. We don’t experience the landscape through a rectangle - it surrounds us."
Image: Coast Collage 2015
"I’ve been to Scotland, Ireland, Brittany and Wales. I spent six weeks painting on Bardsey Island off the coast of North Wales, and that was magical. It’s so easy in modern life to become numb, and I think it’s really important to spend time in wild places because they enrich you. So, I suppose if there’s anything I want to communicate through my painting, it’s a sense of awe and wonder."
"There’s an Irish term for a place that’s close to heaven: a ‘thin’ place – where your connection to the spirits is very close. They’re the places I like. They almost make my spine tingle with how extraordinary they are and how small we human beings are in comparison. So, there’s no big concept with my work, it’s the rawness of nature that really interests me, that and simply connecting to the landscape and the ocean."
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Image: Paul Lewin teaching at Newlyn School of Art
Beyond the Edges
Like many landscape painters, Paul Lewin often pushes the boundaries of the rectangular format he works with. Beyond the Edges enables Paul to teach the more experimental collage and texture-based elements of his practice.
This course will take participants to wild parts of the coastline to gather studies of different landscapes, often using collage on location and drawing studies to bring back to the studio to make more resolved paintings. The exercises incorporate materials such as coloured papers and rough found materials in combination with paint and dry materials such as ink, pastel, and oil pastel to build surfaces and break out of the traditional rectangular format of landscape painting.
This liberating course will help students to push how they approach depicting landscape. Working in a more intuitive way to add energy and texture alongside dynamic shapes to build composition.
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Image: Paul Lewin giving a watercolour demonstration
Paul Lewin also teaches: