Proactive Art Group: Winston Hewitt

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Most artists consider me as being primarily a colorist. My vibratory art with its vivid and sometimes psychedelic color effects, has some roots in Op Art, and even in Huichi yarn paintings. Yet, I paint exclusively in oils. For the ten 36" X 48" canvases in the "Scapes of the Subconscious" series and many of the works that followed, I radically changed my technique. First of all, each shape, including lines and squiggles, must be painted "in a flat hard edged color." Furthermore, spatial dimension must "appear" through this juxtaposition of these colored shapes.

This new technique allowed the easy solution of using contrasting outlines around shapes to clearly separate those of nearly equal tone. The time and effort spent in the constant honing of hues, values and intensities of colors became the focus of refining this technique. No fewer that three coats of pigment were required to complete each color field. The continual refinement of colors lengthened the time span for completion of each canvas. The additional coats of paint were beneficial in the long because they allowed me to enrich the contours of the shadows and highlights so that each shape could suggest a human, animal, or vegetable form, and often two or more images were suggested at the same time by any given color field.

For example, one reads in the publication Artist of the Northwest I , Mountain productions, Inc.0 (P. 63): "Hewitt depicts nature as animistic, sensual, erotic and anthropomorphized. The images, including the squiggles, are intended to lead the observer through associations from the natural phenomena of the physical universe into the various levels of the psyche, as well as various realms of mysticism, mythology, metaphysics, literature, history, aesthetics and art"

Therefore, each work is to be interpreted in multiple manners. A single painting may depict simultaneously two or more of Antiquities premises that the universe is composed of four primary elements being: earth, water, air and fire. For example, some rolling hills may also be seen at the same time as being sea waves, or billowing clouds, or the cross section of a flame or women's thigh, etc. Scale is generally absent or without accent so that the spatial scapes may be interpreted as atomic or galactic in dimension. Is this a microcosm or a macrocosm?

The paintings are not designed as games for the spectator to find hidden objects. Rather, each painting is designed for long and repeated viewing by a relaxed and unhurried spectator who allows his/her levels of the conscious, subconscious and unconscious to form or even create something out of many seemingly amorphous, formless and ambiguous shapes.

At times, interaction with the paintings is like an image thought that has to be unraveled into, acceptable and understandable terms from the viewer's own reality and experience. The images are intended to lead one by associations from the natural phenomena of the physical universe into the realms of psychology, metaphysics, mysticism, mythology, literature, history, aesthetics, drama and art. In short, the metamorphoses occur both on my canvases and also in the mind and imagination of the viewers.

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