David Carmack Lewis

The stories I paint don't have words. They don't have beginnings or endings. They are invitations to a precise moment in a vague time and place, in which possibilities intersect.

I have always been an avid fan of fantasy, comic books, horror, science fiction, and myths. My work may not reflect these interests directly but I believe it is the fantastic which can best evoke in us the rapt response to the unexpected which all too often we leave behind us in childhood. The events described in my work are always unusual. Sometimes they are fantastic and occasionally, clearly impossible. It is a reminder to look around with different eyes, as if mysteries and revelations might reveal themselves at any moment, emerging suddenly from behind a hedge or out of an empty alleyway.
I have also been long fascinated by the middle ages and was once influenced by it's art; the bold lines of early woodcuts, the colors of stained glass and the oddly stylized manner of the figures. That visual comparison is all but gone. The bold lines grew into deep shadows, until the shadows engulfed everything and night fell in my work. The figures in my early work have mysteriously vanished although the human presence remains tantalizingly close. They seem to have stepped out of the frame or pulled the blind only a moment ago. And the colors, which once were meant to capture the fractured light of day now portray a world of darkness only partially and imperfectly revealed by light.
And fires.
I love fires. And it is in the dark, huddled around the rather dim and flickering light of a fire, that stories were first told.