: Lewis Bryden

Lewis Bryden attended college at Yale where he studied architecture; eventually earning a master’s degree from Harvard and working in the field for several years before pursuing a career in painting. Raised in south Florida, Bryden moved to New York City in 1973, where he has lived for 37 years. He spent 14 years living and painting in Brooklyn. In 1988, Bryden purchased a house, which resides on the banks of the Connecticut River in the Pioneer Valley. He often paints on site, in a houseboat/studio named Float des Artistes.

“Painting outdoors has provided some of the happiest moments of my life as an artist. Not only am I surrounded then by my subject, but I can actually feel its presence-the sun on my arms, the breeze at my back, the temperature of the air. These are the qualities that I try to make one feel in my paintings.

Sometimes we look at nature and we are fascinated to see how things move and change. However, there are other times when we look, and we wish that things could stay just as they are forever. Those are the moments that I know I have to make a painting.

Regarding the name of the show: lately I’ve noticed that some natural scenes are in fact pointed out and enhanced by nature itself. So it is that trees or branches or rocks sometimes seem to be selecting a scene for me, as if they were frames. Sometimes even, the thing framed in the distance will at another time become the vantage point from which I can look back at where I was before, that now is the object in the distance. Our orthogonal world is to be echoed in the realm of nature.”

See more of Lewis’ work here.