Music has always permeated Lewis’ existence stemming from his father, a classically trained musician. His birth country, Jamaica, offered a culture rich in musical tradition and visual stimulation. The light, color, and rhythm of the spirit of the people penetrated his consciousness. Moving to the United States and, later in his career, setting up a studio in China expanded his visual and cultural awareness and fueled the creative spirit informing his work and influencing how he sees the world and navigates through it.

Between 2006 and 2015, Lewis created a series of 101 acrylics on rice paper paintings in his new studio space, Oasis, in Beijing, China. The Beijing Booster Scroll series was crafted through those interactions with global traditions from Asia, Jamaica, and America. And to be sure, American and Jamaican jazz music yield a definitive cross-cultural aesthetic. Scrollwork, the curved and spiraled ornamental patterns in architecture and design, is based on observation of nature. To scroll is defined as a kinetic activity to move. To scroll is intuitive. Lewis’ act of painting, while fully informed by his experience, environment, and observation of nature is instinctive. And like our social media scrolls, where we page our scroll keys up or down or across, hoping not to miss out, Lewis’ work invites us to examine the elegant scrollwork at the extension of his brushes.

In this series, Lewis invokes his own “personal scripting,” or scrollwork, embodying the aesthetics and the techniques that resonate with the historical antecedents of Chinese art surrounding Lewis’ studio in Beijing. These narrow, delicate paintings are presented as singular pieces mounted in the eastern traditional Chinese style on silk backings. Each piece combines complex or simple compositions that define the artist’s language of abstraction. The calligraphic quality of the work, recalling Asian scrollwork, lays bare Lewis’ exquisite synthesis of Asian and Jamaican sensitivities. The abundant white spaces place the Taoist belief in the negative space as representing everything and nothing. The asymmetrical balance lends a sense of calming equilibrium to the overall composition. The linear corkscrew structure, surging molecular forms, and bold color harmonies punctuating his scrolls respond to the joyful spirit found in his hometown and augment the human visual perception of music and art.

The creative act involves, Lewis once said, “a series of problems that one encounters on the way that must be resolved formally, aesthetically, and philosophically, to arrive at something meaningful that perhaps can affect change in other human beings. My painting approach is unlike an emergency that must be addressed at the moment; it is a matter of life and death where everything matters.”

Peter Wayne Lewis was born in Kingston, Jamaica. He received his M.A. in Painting from San Jose State University in California and became a tenured Professor of Painting at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston for 25 years, including a stint as Chairman of the Department. He maintains an ambitious studio practice, splitting his time between the New York Metro area and Beijing, China, where he is also the Director of Oasis Gallery-Beijing. He is also a Director on the Advisory Board for WhiteBox, Harlem, NYC. Peter has exhibited extensively in the US, Africa, Caribbean, Europe, and Asia. Recent solo exhibitions include The Delaware Contemporary (2019-2020) in Wilmington, DE; a survey of paintings produced in his studio in Beijing at UCCA - Ullens Center of Contemporary Art in Beijing (curated by Philip Tinari, 2016); and MOCA-North Miami (2015) as well as gallery exhibitions on three continents.

He is in numerous public and private collections in the U.S. and abroad. His curatorial projects include, White Anxieties, WhiteBox Harlem, NYC; Viewpoints: 20 Years of Adderly, MassArt Art Museum, Massachusetts University of Art & Design, Boston, MA; 4321, Matthias Kuper Galleries Stuttgart / Beijing, Beijing, China; Beijing Biennial, National Art Museum of China (NAMOC), Beijing, China Exhibition of International Artists, Inside-Out Art Museum (IOAM), Beijing, China; Olympic Fine Art Exhibition Convention Center Beijing, China; Grand Opening Sunshine International Art Museum Beijing, China; Queen Nanny of the Maroons, In conjunction with the Embassy of Jamaica, Two Lines Gallery, 798 District, Beijing, China; Perfume Painting, Two Lines Gallery, 798 District, Beijing, China; Boston High Tea #2 Master Print+ In conjunction with Massachusetts College of Art Foundation, Two Lines Gallery, 798 District, Beijing, China; and, Marathon, Two Lines Gallery, 798 District, Beijing, China.

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