Rackstraw Downes & Stanley Lewis

“Paint what you see! Paint what you see!” so exclaims Stanley Lewis to a group visiting his retrospective at American University in 2007, describing the mammoth challenge that he faces daily in his own work. Meanwhile Rackstraw Downes traverses the country conscious of season, light, ditches and power lines to find a site that satisfies “some inner need”.

Betty Cuningham Gallery is pleased to present, On-Site, a two-person show featuring major paintings by Rackstraw Downes and Stanley Lewis.

Both Downes and Lewis are on-site painters. Both fight for ‘honest’ observation, with a shared interest in the particular and the mundane. However, they differ greatly by method, by subject, by need, and even sometimes by humor. While Rackstraw will travel miles to sites which intrigue him, Stanley stays put and paints where he is. In a 2006 gallery video Rackstraw speaks about his frustration to do it right: “Do it again, Downes, and get it right this time, the way it really is!! And I love that!”

In a letter to the gallery Stanley writes about trying to get it right: “To do my Best means I go very slowly and try to get everything as good as I can before I move on– I always have to redo everything almost 100 times. Very Slow process. After my eyes warm up, I see every blade of grass.”

Both share the need for adjustment and change. Downes will often find the need to extend his canvas, to include a more than 180º view, splicing on sections on left or right, top or bottom. Lewis on the other hand self-corrects, piling paper over paper, incorporating tears and sometimes staples or nails all towards getting it right. Downes’ canvases surround the viewer demanding a virtual visit to the location, and often exposing an environmental/political message. On the other hand, Lewis’ thickly worked, bas-relief canvases physically share the viewer’s space and open a complex experience of discovery.

A juxtaposition of these two painters, who work to capture the truth of their subjects, opens-up the question of personal observation and objectivity: Painting and building on each moment in time through their personally constructed windows.

“Paint what you see!”

“Do it again! And get it right this time!”

Rackstraw Downes, born in England in 1939, received his BA from University of Cambridge in 1961 and his BFA and MFA from Yale University in 1963 and 1964 respectively. He remained in the United States, becoming a citizen in 1980. He is the recipient of the Guggenheim (1998) and MacArthur (2009) Fellowships, and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1999). A retrospective, Rackstraw Downes: Onsite Paintings, 1972-2008, was organized by the Parrish Art Museum in 2010. It traveled to the Portland Museum of Art, ME, and the Weatherspoon Museum in Greensboro, NC. His work is in the collections of several museums including The Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Philadelphia Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art.

Notably, he delivered the Ninth Annual Raymond Lecture for the Archives of American Art in 2009; in 2011, he participated in a Wyeth Foundation for American Art Conference at the National Gallery of Art, entitled Landscape in American Art, 1940-2000 where he delivered the address “From There to Here;’ in 2012 he was featured on PBS’s critically acclaimed Art 21 series, and in 2015, he delivered the inaugural Betty Jean & Wayne Thiebaud Endowed Lecture at the University of California, Davis.

His essays have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Art in America, ARTnews, and Art Journal. In 2014, Edgewise Press published a collection of his writings in Rackstraw Downes: Nature and Art Are Physical: Writings on Art, 1967-2008. A monograph, with essays by Robert Storr, Sanford Schwartz and Rackstraw Downes, was published by Princeton University Press in 2005. Other books include Under the Gowanus and Razor-Wire Journal (Turning the Head Press, 2000); In Relation to the Whole: Three Essays from Three Decades – 1973, 1981, 1996 (Edgewise Press 2004) and the volume of writings he edited in 1979, Fairfield Porter: Art in Its Own Terms, (Reprinted by the MFA, Boston, 2008). He is represented by Betty Cuningham Gallery, New York.

Stanley Lewis was born in Somerville, New Jersey on October 31, 1941. He graduated from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut in 1963 with a joint major in music and art. His painting teacher was John Frazer. He graduated with high distinction. In the summer of 1962, he studied with William Bailey and Bernard Chaet at the Yale Summer School of Art and Music. He received a Danforth Fellowship for graduate study and received an MFA from Yale University in 1967. His main teachers there were Leland Bell and Nick Carone.

He began teaching at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1969 in the painting department, working under Wilbur Niewald for 17 years. He joined the Bowery Gallery in NYC in 1986. Stanley taught at Smith College from 1986-1990 and then at American University from 1990-2002 working under department chairman Don Kimes. He retired from AU in 2002. He has taught summers at the Chautauqua Institution’s School of Art since 1996 and was on the faculty at the New York Studio School until the end of 2011.

In Sept. 2004 he was in a two man show at Salander-O’Reilly Galleries. A long-time member of the Bowery Gallery, his most recent shows there were in February, 2005 and March, 2008. He was then represented by Lohin Geduld Gallery and had a one man show there, October 13-November 13, 2010. The gallery closed in December of 2011.

From Feb. 17 through April 8, 2007, he had a major retrospective at the Museum in the Katzen Art Center, American University, Washington, DC. There was a smaller version of that show at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, Summit, NJ, that spring. In 2005, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has been elected to membership in the National Academy.

He lives with his wife Karen in Leeds, MA, a part of the city of Northampton. They have 3 children, Timothy, Catherine and John, and 7 grandchildren.