Andrew Lewis is an internationally recognized Canadian artist and designer. His artwork has been commissioned by clients such as the British Columbia Arts Council, Canada Post, the Royal Canadian Mint, Perrier, Scotiabank, the Stratford Festival, Starbucks Coffee, Converse, and VISA.

His work is included in numerous international collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the French National Library, the Permanent Collection of the Library of Congress in Washington D.C., the International Poster Biennial in Mexico City, and the Design Museum in London, England. 

Artist Statement

My work in painting explores how colour and figuration can play beyond the obvious, drawing us inward towards ourselves and our subconscious. I am interested in the psychology of colour and how radical colour combinations and painted layers can affect our viewing experience and encourage us to reflect on our own histories. By centralizing people in my work, my portraits depict a subjective interpretation of how one's inner compass has been reset due to contemporary societal shifts.

My extensive career as a designer has greatly influenced my visual art practice in the way I work with colour and tonality, in addition to the way I utilize narration and allegorical tools. I am drawn to painters such as David Hockney and Georgia O’Keefe who investigate colour and abstraction as tools to relay information. In the same way, I am curious about the storytelling capacities of both the recognizable and the unrecognizable form.

Media

“It’s no stretch to see that very stressful effect COVID had in the last few years here emblazoned in the multitude of faces. Lupita is a near ghostly image, ethereal, both haunting and haunted. Lupita apparently is a personal friend of Lewis’s from Mexico, and this image also references a famous mural in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe (the most-visited Catholic shrine in the world) in Mexico City, the Virgin Guadalupe. So the references of suffering connect to other times and places and histories – and graphic representation. It’s a powerful image once you understand those connections.”
– Vincent Cherniak, Centred.ca