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photo by Iwan Bala. ELFYN LEWIS
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"Hirdir", 1999
acrylic on paper
66x66cm
"Bron-yr-Eryr", 2001
acrylic on paper
66x66cm
"Coed rhiw'r Ceiliog", 2002
acrylic on paper
46x51cm
"Gestiana", 2003
acrylic on paper
......cm
"Pant y Celyn", 2004
acrylic on board
18x28cm
"Psycho Pat", 2005
acrylic on perspex
92x92cm(No.4 collection Cont.Art.Soc.Wales, all others in private collections)
Elfyn Lewis was born in 1969 in Porthmadog, North Wales. In 1987/88 he did a Foundation Course at Gwynedd College Bangor, and from 1988 to 1992 he studied Fine Art at University of Central Lancashire Preston. In 1996/98 he did his MA at University of Wales Institute Cardiff (MA). Early in his career he was associated with 'Super Fury Animals', 'Big Leaves' & 'Catatonia'.
After 1996 "Elfyn's work became more abstract. He was driven by the question 'am I, or am I not a painter' and unlike many who embark on the MA course and move to video, photography or installation, Elfyn decided that he was indeed a painter. But how could he claim his particular piece of ground, his niche in this overcrowded field? He moved away from the expressionist style of his figurative work and began to employ a process based means of painting; dragging swathes of primary paint across the surface of canvas and paper, encouraging accident and inviting, conjuring, forms to appear. Abstraction in painting has taken on the appearance of several art movements not purely formal, surrealism, expressionism, minimalism, even pop, but traditional landscape is an idiom most readily affixed onto an abstract canvas by the bewildered viewer. It is easy to see the contours of a 'view through the window' as soon as anything resembling a horizon line appears, a suggestion of clouds and mountains register through the eye to the brain which immediately tries to make pictorial sense of the image. Like gazing into the flames of a fire, abstract shapes become trees and lakes. Where the viewer is unaccustomed to reading an abstract image as pure colour, pure form, (and this is particularly true in Wales) long discussions are held on each interpretation of what 'the picture is about', what it is recognisably about. Elfyn's paintings seem to make an ironic comment on this habit, in that they can be viewed as both abstract and figurative....He works prodigiously, since accident and overlays are part of the process, much work, perhaps 90% is discarded. The working process is that of the controlled accident '90% process, 9% skill, 1% luck, but the 1% luck is what you are looking for' says the artist." (excerpt quoted from Iwan Bala's catalogue text for 'The Naming of Things' exhibition at the Capsule Gallery Cardiff 2001)
Awards: 1996 RCA Conwy Young Contemporaries Award winner; 2001 Arts Council of Wales travel grant to New York.
Commissions: 1991 large mural for University of Central Lancashire; 1994 CD front cover for Catatonia Sain Records; 1995-1999 several unspecified; 2000 Artworks Wales project at the National Eisteddfod Llanelli; 2001 Artist in Residence on the 'Colours of Freedom' play at Theatr Bara Caws Caernarfon.
International Links:
exhibitions abroad=2003 mixed exhibition in Bern/Switzerland
