Eugene Lewis was born in Philadelphia in 1940. By the time he reached kindergarten, most people called him Gene so I've been Gene Lewis to virtually everyone ever since. My father, Martin Lewis, was a professional artist and so was his younger brother Hal. So I grew up in a family of artists and craftsman, all of whom were quick to offer advice, explanations and critique about anything I did. Other than the enormous influence of these two, I am self taught, a term I hesitate to use since people like my late friend Jack Cartlidge, sculptor and craftsman continued to teach me through the years.
For forty of those years I taught, wrote, and administered in small liberal arts colleges. This was my "day job." During the rest of the substantial time college professors can "steal" from the classroom and the office, I made sculpture in clay, wood and stone. Now, I work seven days a week on sculpture and live in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.
As far as my sculpture has any pattern of consistency to it, I struggle to find elegance (both mathematical and in the ordinary sense of the word) in two kinds of forms. I call these forms biomorphic and geometric. In all of my work, one can find my struggle with representing these classic elements of beauty in two natural media, wood and stone. In style, I suppose they are Modernist since I was born and matured during modernity and despite reading multiple books and articles, fail to grasp the term "post modernity."
